November 2007 Archives

"Exercise is that technique by which one imposes on the body tasks that are both repetitive and different, but always graduated. . . . towards a terminal state."

And then, ominously:
"Exercise, having become an element in the political technology of the body and of duration, does not culminate in a beyond, but tends toward a subjection that has never reached its limit."

Keep that in mind next time you step on the treadmill: a subjection that has no limit.

(from Discipline and Punish, Vintage Books (1991), p. 161, 162)

The title of a Discovery Channel special.

I have never seen anything quite like this. Isn't HPV an STD?

For background, see the article, Beyond Compare by Micol Seigel.

Transnational history presents a two-pronged revision to comparative historical scholarship, one methodological and one ethical. The first expands on what students of Atlantic History and African Diaspora have long recognized: many historical phenomena (slavery, trade, migration, kin-networks) overflow nation-states. Histories that confine these phenomena within national boundaries are simply inadequate, imprecise. The second revision roots transnational scholarship in a critique of U.S. imperialism, insisting that comparative history actually helps produce differences between the nations it purports to study. Far from reifying the nation-state, for Micol Seigel and other transnational historians, history should be criticizing nationalism, steadily eroding this foundation of inequality.

This double imperative is crucial to understanding the promise and peril of transnational revisions. The first revision, a challenge to what Micol Seigel calls the “hermeneutical preeminence of nations,” represents transnational history’s most enduring contribution. The second, a plea for ethical critique, is more problematic.

Jose C. Moya, Cousins and Strangers: Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires, 1850-1930 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998)

Lara Putnam, The Company They Kept: Migrants and the Politics of Gender in Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870-1960 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2002)

Rebecca J. Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2005), 263.

Jose C. Moya’s Cousins and Strangers is a remarkable effort. It is, as Nora Faires writes, really “three notable works: a detailed, probing social history . . . a shorter, provocative foray into the theoretical thicket . . . and a historiographical tour de force.” Moya’s “foray” into the question of individual agency is particularly provocative, comparing fruitfully with recent works by Rebecca Scott and Lara Putnam.

Moya rejects the premise that immigrants were “helpless pawns” moved about by “deterministic forces.” But as his research developed, his central concern shifted: “I became less interested in stressing the immigrants’ role as volitional actors in the drama,” he writes, “and more intrigued by how structural parameters limited and shaped that volition.” He discovers that while individuals had their personal reasons for going, other factors led them to move when they did: the European population explosion, the mechanization of agriculture, and the rise of political liberalism, among others. Moya is not impressed by the role of government in this wave of migration, which, aside from keeping the borders open, “proved to be superstructural and even superfluous.”

Making the Sources Speak: Ulrich, Taylor, and Heyrman on the Early Republic

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (New York: Vintage Books, 1991)

Alan Taylor, William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (New York: Vintage Books, 1996)

Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997)

Great historians have a knack for seeing the potential in primary sources. Forgotten archives, mundane diaries, unnoticed correspondence – these become treasure troves in the hands of imaginative scholars. For the historian must also bring the source to life, analyzing, interpreting, paraphrasing in such a way as to engage attention and sustain the argument.

Three historians – Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Alan Taylor, and Christine Leigh Heyrman – have accomplished this difficult task with remarkable dexterity, and a careful examination of their work yields important points of comparison. Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale is the story of one document, one person, in one small New England town. Taylor’s William Cooper’s Town is broader in scope, relating the rise and fall of one man and in the process telling the story of the early frontier and New York politics. Wider-ranging still is Heyrman’s Southern Cross, a grand tale of evangelicalism’s cultural adaptation and consequent ascendancy across “the South.” The differing subject matter, the authors’ individual styles, and the nature of the sources themselves all affect the techniques they use to make their sources speak. In the end, it is a question of how well the authors demonstrate their authority. Whom do we believe? and why?

In case you were wondering:

". . . zombies elude essentialist interpretations. . ."

-- Isak Niehaus, "Witches and Zombies of the South African Lowveld: Discourse, Accusations and Subjective Reality" (Royal Anthropological Institute 2005).

Lara Putnam, The Company They Kept: Migrants and the Politics of Gender in Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870-1960 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2002).

The Company They Kept is another of the apparently untold stories of Latin American and Caribbean history. We have heard the tale of banana companies’ ruthless exploitation of land, laborers, and governments in Latin America, as well as the mostly vain attempts of laborers and governments to resist, but the full story of the migrant population that supplied labor to Latin America’s various nineteenth- and twentieth-century export booms has been neglected. This is especially true of the women who worked in petty retail, domestic service, or prostitution. Putnam partially rectifies that neglect by telling the stories of Port Limón, Costa Rica, from 1870-1960. The stories can be disorienting if one lacks a firm grasp of the political and economic historiography that preceded Putnam’s effort, but they are nonetheless illuminating.

Along the way Putnam provides one of the clearest statements about the categories of race and gender I have yet seen: “Race and gender are both culturally constructed hierarchies that justify the unequal distribution of material power with reference to supposed biological difference.” She is careful to point out, however that race and gender “are very different kinds of things. . . . Race can be constructed at a distance; gender is created up close and personal” (16).

The distinction is helpful because race, gender, and class are sometimes treated as if they were modular, as if the oppression of colored people, female people, and poor people were of a piece. Much of the argument for the legitimacy of gender as a category of analysis, in fact, seems to be based on the widespread acceptance of race as a category of analysis. If race and gender are equally culturally constructed, the logic goes, then they are equally susceptible to being dismantled.

But as Putnam demonstrates in her reconstruction of family and community networks among migrants in Costa Rica, race and gender show up in very different ways. Whereas oppression of chinos in Costa Rica was predicated on hatred and disgust for the entire race, inequality between men and women before the law was predicated not on misogyny but on the idea that women would have access to justice through their husbands or fathers. Perhaps Limón’s unusual regard for women’s rights (as seen in the ability of prostitutes to sue for defamation or loss of property) was partially due to the awareness that migrant men were unusually unreliable in caring for their spouses.

Underlying the use of race, gender, and class as categories of analysis seems to be an assumption that inequality is the fundamental evil of human relations; underlying that assumption seems to be a definition of inequality that is tied very closely to the putative rights of individuals. Racial and gendered oppression are seen as two faces of one problem partially because people are seen as atomistic isolates. But exclusion of an ethnic group is different than exclusion of one gender precisely because while men and women cannot be separated from the families and communities that tie them together, ethnic groups are separated from each other by the creation of segregated family and community structures.