Newsletters Archive Fall 1997
Dialog 2
Letter from Tom Haskell, Director, 1993-1997
Letter from CSC's new director, David Nirenberg
1996-1997 Conferences
Workshops and Study Groups, 1996-1997
- Ancient Mediterranean Civilizations Workshop (AMC)
- Asian Studies Workshop (ASW)
- Continental Theory Workshop (CTW)
- Feminist Reading Group (FRG)
- Judaic Studies Workshop (JSW)
- Medieval Studies Workshop (MSW)
- Nineteenth Century Enquiry (NICE)
- Central Europe Study Group (CESG)
- Environmental Study Group (ESG)
- Late Editions (LE)
Other Lectures
-Topics in History-
- "Victorian Men Who Killed Women: Why They Did It, What Happened to Them, and What We Can Learn from Them"
- "The Scopes Trial in History and Legend"
- "Here and Everywhere: Current Trends in the Social Studies of Science"
-Topics in African Studies-
- "The Power Within: Genres in Popular Culture"
- "Ethnicity versus Democracy and Nationalism in Rwanda, 1890-1996"
- "The Challenges of Land Tenure Reform in Africa "
-Topics in Arts and Letters-
- "The Manufacture of Disagreement"
- "Nature, Artifice, and Power: Engineering and Absolutism in 17th-Century French Gardens"
-Topics in Religious Studies-
- "Poetry, Visionary Revelation and Philosophy: An Exploration into Songs of Realization in Indo-Tibetan Culture"
- "Gender Ambiguity in the Cult of the Goddess Inanna/Ishtar"
Letter from Tom Haskell, Director, 1993-1997
With the close of academic year 1996-97, I take great pleasure in passing responsibility for the direction of the Center to associate professor of history David Nirenberg. David brings to the job a fresh perspective, abundant energy, and an intellectual style that nicely balances rigorous discrimination of quality with generous respect for approaches and opinions other than his own. Since no director can avoid making decisions that meet with the disapproval of one or another element of the Center's complex constituency, the best anyone can hope for is a director of independent mind and broad sympathies. In these vital respects, Dean Brown could not have chosen a person better qualified for the job.
When I agreed to become director of the Center in February 1993, its founding director, Mike Fischer, had recently left Rice and the Center had been adrift for some months. A committee to reevaluate the Center, led by Meredith Skura, had just submitted a report that warmly commended Mike's ecumenical leadership and reaffirmed the need for an organization to stimulate interdisciplinary and cross-cultural scholarship on this campus, but the report also proposed fairly extensive changes in the way the center was organized. Carrying out those recommendations became my principal business as director.
One key change, effected immediately, was the establishment of an advisory panel to share decision-making responsibility with the director. Since 1993 all of the Center's major decisions have reflected the collective judgment of the director and four panelists who are appointed to two-year terms by the dean of humanities on the basis of faculty nominations submitted annually at the beginning of the fall semester. Major decisions are made at two annual meetings of the panel, one in May when funding allocations for the coming year are decided, another in early February, when Center fellows are selected. The panel meets on other occasions as the need arises and its members are routinely consulted by e-mail. Efforts are made to insure that the panel includes representation from outside the humanities division and by scholars whose interests lie beyond the borders of Europe and the United States. I have found the advisory panel to be an indispensable resource and take this occasion to thank all those who served on it during my years in office: Steven Crowell (philosophy), Scott Derrick (English), George Marcus (anthropology), Susan McIntosh (anthropology), Gerald McKenny (religious studies), Helena Michie (English), Hamid Naficy (art & art history), Richard Smith (history), Martin Wiener (history) and Harvey Yunis (classics).
Of the other changes called for by the Skura committee, none were more important than adequate office space and staff support. A new Center office and seminar room seem sure to materialize within the next two or three years as the humanities division moves into new and refurbished space. A great leap forward in staff support took place at the end of 1995, when Pam Walker, a Rice PhD in English, was hired to fill a half-time position as assistant director of the Center. Pam now oversees all the Center's activities, publishes this newsletter and a periodic calendar of events, and manages the blizzard of paperwork created by bringing to campus 80 to 110 visitors during a typical year. Since the assistant director's position is half time, no one should imagine that the Center is now able to make effortless the inescapable chores of organizing visits and conferences; putting on a major conference still requires an immense commitment of time and energy from the proposer, as well as from the Center's staff. Just ask Bill Camfield, who put together a splendid conference on Duchamp this year, or Hamid Naficy and David Nirenberg, who organized equally admirable conferences last year. But much has been done to assemble in-house funding for such events, streamline the organizational process, and take the drudgery out of it.
Of course these organizational and logistical matters are merely means to the end of superior scholarship. The expectations that I inherited in 1993 largely concerned structural improvements; now that an improved structure is in place, my successor inherits the burden of putting it to good use. One obvious line of development lies in the direction of acquiring grant support under Center auspices. It remains to be seen whether the present level of Center staffing is adequate to carry out that function efficiently. It would also obviously be unrealistic to expect any director to create grant-worthy projects out of whole cloth. If such projects are to accomplish anything of intellectual value, they must not only have the willing support of individual faculty members, they must authentically arise out of those individuals' deepest interests and career goals, which the Center can only orchestrate, not create. And although additional resources are always welcome, whatever their form, in these lean times the most fruitful resources may take the form of open-ended gifts and endowments not tied to any agency's agenda or program. The strongest humanities centers are those that have endowed funds flexible enough to bring in a few visiting scholars every year, to work collaboratively with local faculty who share common interests, whatever they may be. I look forward to the day when CSC can do the same.
Finally a word of thanks and commendation to the administration. It goes without saying that none of the Center's recent advances could have occurred without the support of Deans Matusow and Brown, Provost Auston, and President Gillis. What is less widely understood is that in this and other ways -- library development and the creation of a language center most conspicuously -- the current administration is taking very substantial steps to strengthen the humanities and social sciences at Rice. To be sure, the atmosphere of technocracy and vocationalism that we humanists (sometimes unfairly) associate with Rice's origins as a school dedicated mainly to science and engineering is still perceptible from time to time. I would be the last to pretend that the complex process of transforming Rice Institute into Rice University is complete, or that it will require from individual faculty members any less patience and tenacity in the future than in the past. But much is being done to right the ancient lopsidedness of this campus. And the Center for the Study of Cultures has a potentially pivotal role to play in helping to make this the truly well-balanced university it has set out to become.
Thomas L. Haskell
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Letter from CSC's new director, David Nirenberg
This year marks the tenth birthday of the Center for the Study of Cultures, and the leadership of Michael Fischer and Thomas Haskell has made the decade a fruitful one. Since 1987 the Center has granted some thirty-three semester long fellowships, provided more than $100,000 in funding for a number of workshops and reading groups, financed innumerable speakers and conferences, helped to underwrite publication projects, found office space, and hired Dr. Pam Walker to fill the part-time position of assistant director. It has, in short, splendidly succeeded in its stated goal of facilitating "Rice's participation in national and international debates by providing a forum for interdisciplinary and comparative discussions of 'culture' in the broadest sense of that term," and in the process it has transformed many of our intellectual lives.
It is the task of a new director to live up to the promise of this inheritance and to build upon it in ways which best complement the evolving needs of the humanities and social sciences. Such needs only become apparent through conversation, so I hope that you will be liberal with your input and advice. In the interest of initiating that conversation, let me put forward two potential areas of incremental growth, at disciplinary boundaries and at organizational ones, and solicit your opinion about them. First, the question of disciplinary boundaries: at present, the activities of the CSC rarely include disciplines in the humanities and social sciences which have taken a quantitative, symbolic or mathematical rather than a linguistic turn. Is the fostering of comparative or interdisciplinary dialogue between these two types of disciplines part of the mission of the CSC, and if so, how can such dialogue best be fomented? Second, a question of organizational boundaries: in recent years the primary function of the CSC has been to fund speakers and conferences, and to facilitate the administration of such events. Should the Center play a more active role in furthering interdisciplinary, comparative or collaborative research, and in helping to secure funding for such projects?
I mention these two directions in which we might build upon past success in order to open discussion, not foreclose it. It is my sense that the many accomplishments of the past decade in no way diminish the possibilities of the next. I hope you share my optimism, and I look forward to learning from you not only what is possible, but also what is desirable.
David Nirenberg
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Marcel Duchamp and Rethinking the Creative Act
March 1997
Two goals motivated the organization of this interdisciplinary symposium sponsored by the CSC, the dean of humanities, and the department of art and art history: a presentation of scholars representing the quality and diversity of current Duchamp studies and recognition of the 40th anniversary of a remarkable talk titled "The Creative Act" that Duchamp delivered in Houston in April 1957.
This conference generated a lively dialogue among six speakers, four discussants, and a full-house audience in 301 Sewall Hall over March 21-22. The day and a half of papers was enriched by a mini-exhibition of the 1957 event in Houston, a display and sale of publications on Duchamp, and a selection of films by, with, and about Duchamp screened at the Rice Media Center on March 23. In addition, the Menil Collection enhanced the symposium by honoring the speakers at a dinner in the collection galleries on Thursday, March 20.
Dalia Judovitz (French, Emory) and Francis Naumann (independent scholar, New York) opened the conference on Friday with topics on creativity. In a lecture entitled "Playing the Field: Redefining Artistic Production," Judovitz proposed parallels between the creation of art and Duchamp's life-long passion for the game of chess. She focused not on images and themes of chess (significant in his work) but on less obvious links: the adversarial nature of art; art as a strategic game that draws on previous traditions (moves) in order to reconfigure the game board/field of art; and Duchamp's ready-mades as an art form that outwitted both cubism and mimetic art by conflating art and its industrial source, by fusing sign-signifier-signified.
Naumann's lecture, "The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," explored Duchamp's practice of replicating works throughout his career, from three versions of the famous "Nude Descending a Staircase" (1912) to replicas of various ready-mades from 1915 into the 1960s. Contrary to critics offended by Duchamp's practice of replication, Naumann argued that Duchamp's replications were, in effect, different (unique) works, subject to his discriminating decisions, and -- for an artist who hated to repeat himself -- an ironic means of avoiding repetition.
David Joselit (art history, UC-Irvine) opened the Saturday session with the lecture "Mensuration en abyme: Marcel Duchamp's Cubism." In his evocative analyses of Duchamp's "Network of Stoppages" (1914) and "Tu m'" (1918), Joselit revealed the complexity of masculine/feminine and mensurability/incommensurability mapped on to the interplay of abstraction and carnality in these two works. Duchamp's cubism was also the subject of the lecture "Countering Bergsonist Cubism: Duchamp's Readymades and the Playful Science of the Large Glass" by Linda Dalrymple Henderson (art history, UT-Austin). Henderson examined Duchamp's ready-mades and "The Large Glass" as works that oppose the artistic taste and faith in beauty that his colleagues among the Bergsonian cubists celebrated. Henderson looked at both word play (language) and science -- the play, for example, between "goût" (taste) and "goutte" (drop) in Duchamp's ready-made "Comb," whose inscription includes the phrase "gouttes d'hauteur" that suggests "goût d'auteur." Concepts from science included the solidification of gas (dependent on extreme cold) that informs the chilly realm of the bachelors in "The Large Glass," the snowy landscape in "Pharmacy," and the snow shovel ready-made, "In Advance of the Broken Arm."
Counter to most current views of Duchamp, Herbert Molderings (art history, Ruhr University, Bochum) argued that Duchamp was concerned with keeping alive the great traditions of art, including the concept of art as a para-religious activity. He observed that Duchamp, distressed over the commodification of art after World War II, assembled his astounding late work "Given" in secret and specified the conditions for its release after his death. In so doing, Duchamp preserved for posterity this unsettling work, an esoteric peep show that, among other things, incorporates a profound self-referential dimension, an allegory on naked truth, and the act of looking at seeing.
The final talk, "Duchamp at the Movies," by Molly Nesbit (art history, Vassar) also dealt with the late work "Given." In contrast to most interpreters, who view it as a commentary of sorts on Duchamp's earlier work (especially "The Large Glass"), Nesbit dwelled on "Given" as partly a product of moments shared by Duchamp and Teeny, his wife. Those moments included such things as the movie "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane," Rilke's essays on nature, and the light effects and a waterfall savored at a vacation site near Lausanne -- simple experiences outside the expectations of weighty historical research that nonetheless may have informed Duchamp's work with a "doll," light, and landscape in "Given."
A concluding panel of all six speakers was moderated by symposium organizer, William A. Camfield (art history), with the assistance of three discussants: Walter Hopps (The Menil Collection); Dana Friis Hansen (Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston), and Thomas McEvilley (art history). From beginning to end, not only did members of the Rice community and the larger art and academic community of Houston attend, but also artists and art historians, museum curators, art critics, art collectors, and gallery owners from Seattle, San Diego, Dallas, Ft. Worth, Austin, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Brussels, and Paris. Early returns indicate an audience engrossed by the diversity of styles, approaches, and conclusions offered by the speakers: the declarative, informational style of Henderson, who packed her talk with insights regarding Duchamp's references to contemporary science; the more allusive and subjective approach of Nesbit; Judovitz's stress on Duchamp's control over his work (like a chess player who must know both sides of the board to win); and Moldering's experience of Duchamp's work as a deeply felt act that ultimately operates in a zone beyond control.
As Duchamp observed in his 1957 talk on "The Creative Act," the artist is a medium who, finally, does not accomplish what he intended and can never fully comprehend what he did accomplish. That, he reminds us, is the ongoing task of history, of the spectators.
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Historians on the Holocaust: A Series of Lectures
1996-1997
Daniel Goldhagen's recent book Hitler's Willing Executioners reopened a number of important historical debates pertaining to the way historians should understand the Holocaust. The lecture series on "Historians on the Holocaust: a Fin-de-Siècle Perspective," was intended to shed light on this question, both for a Rice community and members of the local community, who turned out to hear the lectures in large numbers.
On October17, Christopher Browning (history, Pacific Lutheran), Goldhagen's main antagonist in Hitler's Willing Executioners, delivered the first lecture, "Explaining the Holocaust Perpetrators: Ordinary Men or Ordinary Germans." Browning, who is perhaps the leading American historian of the Holocaust, proposed a multicausal explanation of the Holocaust, in contrast to Goldhagen's near exclusive reliance on the importance of German anti-Semitism.
The next lecturer was Saul Friedlander (history, Tel Aviv and UCLA). Friedlander's October 29 lecture, "Two Jewish Historians in Extremis: Ernst Kantorowicz and Marc Bloch in the Face of Nazism and Collaboration," examined the difficult life-choices these two highly assimilated Jewish historians were forced to make as Jews rapidly became persona non gratis in Nazi-dominated Europe.
Gulie Ne'man Arad (history, Tel Aviv) delivered the third lecture in the series, "From Estrangement to Embracement: The Holocaust in American Jewish Consciousness," on November 8. She showed how a preoccupation with the Holocaust among American Jews has gradually usurped other more traditional manifestations of Jewish identity.
The final lecturer, Michael Marrus (history, Toronto), spoke on January 17. In his talk, "The Vatican and the Holocaust: A New Perspective," he discussed a secret encyclical on racism and anti-Semitism that had been commissioned by Pope Pius XI in 1938 and which was essentially suppressed by his successor, Pius XII. Many of the church's traditional ambivalences concerning Judaism surfaced in the debate surrounding the disputed document.
Series attendance, which averaged around 100 persons per lecture, indicated that the question of how one goes about historicizing the Holocaust is one that still evokes controversy and concern from many quarters. Richard Wolin (history) organized the lectures, with support not only from CSC but also the dean of humanities and religious studies.
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Kinship & Cosmopolitanism
March 1997
The conference "Kinship and Cosmopolitanism" was convened on March 28 and 29. John Borneman (anthropology, Cornell) delivered the keynote address in the opening session. His talk, "Caring and Being Cared For: Displacing Gender, Kinship, Marriage, and Family," inspired many questions and comments, and provided an introduction to the issues treated in the two panels of the following day. The first of these panels, "Technologies of the Self and the Risks of Self-Construction," included presentations by Laurel George, Deepa Reddy, Lamia Karim, and Stanford Carpenter, all graduate students in the Rice department of anthropology. Betty Joseph (English) served as discussant. The second panel, also composed of graduate students in anthropology, included Nityanand Deckha, Ricardo Lima, Denise Youngblood, and Jamila Bargach (whose paper was delivered, in her absence, by Lamia Karim). Susan Ossman (media and communications, Sorbonne) provided a discussion and a commentary on the conference as a whole.
Given the topic and the date (during Easter vacation), attendance was remarkably high: more than thirty people for the keynote and the morning session, and more than twenty for the afternoon session. Expanded versions of the conference proceedings will be submitted for consideration to the University of Wisconsin Press in the fall. James Faubion (anthropology) organized the conference, with funding both from CSC and the Center for the Study of Institutions and Values.
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New Directions in Cultural Analysis:
Lauren Berlant, Katie Stewart, and Greg Urban: April 1997
In the opening session of this April conference, which was organized by Benjamin Lee (anthropology) and funded by CSC and anthropology, the three panelists introduced their recent books, focusing on the relations between narrative structuring and the specific content of their investigations. Urban (anthropology, Pennsylvania) is the author of A Metaphysical Community, Stewart (anthropology, UT-Austin) of A Place by the Side of the Road, and Berlant (English, Chicago) of The Queen of America Goes to Washington City. Although Urban's book concerns Brazilian Amerindians, while Stewart's deals with Appalachian story-telling and Berlant's with American sexual politics, all the books evince the authors' common interest in how the public circulation of discourse provides alternative perspectives to sender-receiver models of communication and to culture as shared meaning.
All panelists deemed themselves post-structuralist thinkers, yet differed on the designation's particular meanings. Urban emphasized how his focus on the circulation of discourse allowed him to "deconstruct" traditional notions of kinship and social organization, and to move beyond the referential functions of language in most anthropological theories of representation. Stewart discussed how her work on story-telling in rural communities of West Virginia revealed ways that stories become living forms of cultural memory, not only relaying incidents from the past but forming part of a culturally built environment with all the density, constraints, and opportunities of the natural environment. Berlant showed how public representations of citizenship have led to an idealization of the child as the potentially perfect citizen whom parents must nurture and protect. A "sentimental contract" and a discourse of "injured feelings" have emerged, replacing political discussions of justice and equality with definitions of citizenship as a set of certain attitudes towards the family and children. For each panelist, the lack of standard archival materials about the subjects of their books prompted an interest in the semiotic aspects of their particular materials and of semiotic analyses of contemporary cultural forms in general.
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Workshops and Study Groups 1996-1997
Ancient Mediterranean Civilizations Workshop (AMC)
Coordinators: Michael Maas (History, and Director, Ancient Mediterranean Civilizations Program) and Harvey Yunis (Hispanic and Classical Studies)
With many regular participants on leave during 1996-97, the group suspended its readings and discussions, and spent its resources on a symposium called "Classical Education in the Humanities: Ancient and Modern Problems," which was held on February 7 and organized by Maas and Yunis. The purpose of the symposium was threefold: to investigate the significance of classical education during earlier historical periods; to consider how Rice might benefit from a fuller integration of the classics within its humanities curriculum; and to make more visible to the Rice faculty the current instruction in classical studies at Rice. Two distinguished speakers addressed a large audience composed not only of Rice faculty, administrators, and students but also educators from within Houston and other Texas universities. Richard Thomas (classics, Harvard) spoke on "Virgil in a Cold Climate: Europe's Poet in Europe's Crisis," a treatment of how the Roman poet's imperial vision was interpreted and abused in Fascist Germany and Italy. Arthur Eckstein (history, Maryland-College Park) explored the political uses and abuses of historical interpretation in his lecture,"History as Moral Education in Antiquity and in the Modern University." Hilary Mackie (classics) and Werner Kelber (religious studies) served as respondents in a discussion moderated by Yunis.
The positive response to the symposium led to a follow-up meeting of interested faculty two weeks after the symposium, and this group decided to offer a new seminar in the academic year 1997-98. Entitled "Classical Traditions in the Humanities," the seminar will meet monthly and is open to the entire Rice academic community. Sessions will entail discussions of methodological and pedagogical issues and presentations by speakers whose expertise complements the goals of the seminar. The seminar is intended to "open up" the classics for the humanities faculty and influence the current rethinking of the humanities curriculum.
Asian Studies Workshop (ASW)
Coordinator: Richard J. Smith (History, and Director, Asian Studies Program)
The ASW met throughout the year to discuss matters of mutual interest, including members' current research. The group also held an informal faculty-student roundtable on the implications of Deng Xiaoping's death, and helped organize the visits of Jonathan Spence (history, Yale) and Steven Goodman (Institute for Integral Studies, UC-Berkeley). In addition, a number of faculty continued to teach Asian Studies classes for the general public (through Rice's division of program of continuing studies), and several participated in teacher-training programs designed for primary and secondary schools in the greater Houston area. The Asian studies faculty, besides Richard Smith, includes the following: Lilly Chen (linguistics), Anne Klein (religious studies), Caroline Houng (linguistics), Benjamin Lee (anthropology), Stephen Lewis (political science), Douglas Mitchell (linguistics), Arun Prakash (linguistics), Nanxiu Qian (linguistics), Hiroko Sato (linguistics), Steve Tyler (anthropology), Fred Von Der Mehden (political science), Insun Yang (linguistics), Mimi Zhang (linguistics).
Funds from CSC, the provost, and major grants from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation and the Ford Motor Company enable the Asian studies faculty to work toward three interrelated goals: the "internationalization" of the curriculum at Rice; close collaboration with Asian studies scholars at other institutions; and innovative course development. On March 1, a workshop on "Internationalizing the Disciplines" featured scholars from several universities: Arjun Appadurai (anthropology, Chicago, and director, Chicago Humanities Institute), Leo Lee (Chinese studies, Harvard), Doris Sommer, (Latin American studies, Harvard), Jack Tchen (director, Asian-American studies, New York University), and, from Rice, Benjamin Lee and Richard Smith. Before an audience of about twenty-five people, the scholars discussed how universities can create more linguistically, culturally, and historically sensitive approaches to the study of contemporary culture. The basic challenge is this: How, from a given location, do we create forms of understanding that can effectively grapple with both the situatedness of local knowledge and its more global implications?
A two-day conference on "Rethinking Area and Ethnic Studies: The Case of China" was held on April 25-26, and attracted an audience of about sixty people. Scholars from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Mainland China, and the United States discussed pedagogical and research issues, and explored new forms of inter-institutional collaboration in studying contemporary China. In addition to Rice's Benjamin Lee, Richard Smith, and Jianying Zha (visiting scholar), the panelists included: Stephen Chan (comparative literature, Hong Kong); Yvonne Sung-sheng Chang (Chinese and comparative literature, UT-Austin), J. F. Lee (president and chief executive officer, Aqua Communications, Cambridge, Mass.), Leo Lee (Chinese studies, and director of ethnic studies, Harvard), Ping-hui Liao (comparative literature, National Tsinghua University, Taiwan), Hsu-mei Shih (modern Chinese literature and Asian American literature, UCLA), Hui Wang (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, and editor of Dushu, Reading), Jing Wang (Chinese literature and culture, Duke), Renqiu Yu (history, and director, Asian studies, SUNY - Purchase).
In general, the participants concurred that the divisions among international, area, ethnic, and cultural studies have contributed to an academic "balkanization" just when universities must go global. Area programs encourage work on local cultures but often overlook the global processes acting upon those cultures. Moreover, these programs tend to treat ethnic-studies scholars as if they were concerned only with a domestic perversion of "authentic" local societies (e.g. "Chinese studies" vs. "Chinese-American studies"). Cultural-studies programs focus on contemporary culture, but they lack both historical perspective and comparative depth. International-relations programs have tended tend to focus on the economics and politics of nation states, and are only beginning to adjust to a world in which non-state relations are increasingly important. Greater understanding requires new forms of international collaboration, a reorientation of established disciplinary frameworks, and a redirection of resources.
The conference led to the establishment of the "Consortium on Contemporary Chinese Studies" (CCCS), a permanent cooperative venture among the schools represented by the conference participants and several other institutions, which is intended to serve as a model for other area-based but globally oriented programs. Focused on the internationalization of the new middle class in China and Asia, the basic goal of this project is to understand the forces shaping the rise of the new middle classes in the greater China region and how these emerging groups are related to their counterparts throughout Asia. An initial four-year plan includes the following activities: (1) an annual conference in a Chinese environment (Hong Kong, the mainland, Taiwan, or Singapore) for presenting research on popular culture, consumer tastes, market transformations, etc.; (2) an annual conference at Rice for gathering scholars, entrepreneurs, and cultural practitioners from China to meet with U.S. experts on jointly chosen topics; (3) several visitors from China (including writers, film makers, entrepreneurs, academics, intellectuals, artists, and other cultural practitioners) to be in residence each year for one or two weeks, conduct faculty workshops, lecture in both academic and public venues, and give videotaped interviews; (4) a lecture series by American scholars focusing on themes of middle class culture, and (5) the establishment of a state-of-the-art electronic archive for sharing audio/visual resources that enhance teaching and research, and which will result in publications in both English and Chinese.
Continental Theory Workshop (CTW)
Coordinator: Jack Zammito (History)
The CTW dedicated its readings and discussions to the theme of irony in contemporary discourse and as it emerged as a dominant concept in the Western tradition from Socrates to the nineteenth century. This project was a sequel to the CTW's consideration of the sublime along similar lines the previous year.
Participants first considered contemporary "postmodernist" approaches to irony, in particular Linda Hutcheon's Irony's Edge and "The Power of Postmodern Irony" and Richard Rorty's Contingency, Irony and Solidarity together with T. Cleveland's critique, "The Irony of Contingency and Solidarity." The group next read texts which set off the "postmodern" appropriation of irony: Paul de Man's "The Rhetoric of Temporality" and Hayden White's Tropics of Discourse, and then returned to the origin, with Gregory Vlastos' Socrates, Ironist and Moral Phnilosopher and two commentaries: D. Roochnik's "Socratic Ignorance as Complex Irony: A Critique of Gregory Vlastos" and J. Gordon's "Against Vlastos on Complex Irony." Sören Kierkegaard's The Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates followed, and, since Kierkegaard argued that the conflict between Friedrich Schlegel's romanticism and Hegel's idealism gave irony its decisive modern departure from Socrates, the group then studied the idea of irony in German romanticism and idealism, drawing upon P. Szondi's "Friedrich Schlegel and Romantic Irony" and E. Behler's "Hegel und Friedrich Schlegel" and Irony and the Discourse of Modernity. Final readings were two works by guest lecturer Roger Bartra (Universidad Autónoma, Mexico), The Cage of Melancholy and "Method in a Cage," a talk delivered at the University of Chicago in Spanish and translated by CTW member Lane Kauffmann (Hispanic and classical studies) expressly for the discussion with Bartra. Bartra presented his views on postmodern anthropology and the problem of national mythology.
Regular CTW participants, besides Zammito and Kauffmann, included: Rob Bledsoe (German and Slavic studies), Steve Crowell (philosophy), Harvey Yunis (Hispanic and classical studies) and Harris Rosenstein (independent art critic and theorist). Occasional participants were Kathy Haney (philosophy, UH), David Mickics (English, UH), Bernardo Perez (Hispanic and classical studies); Stephen Tyler (anthropology), and Kareem Akerma (visiting scholar).
For 1997-98, CTW plans a spring roundtable discussion on the philosophy of history in the context of postmodernism, which will feature Frank Ankersmit (history and philosophy, Gröningen). The group also intends to recruit new members and to work closely with the AMC Workshop to explore the question of the classical legacy as it bears on current humanities programs at Rice. In its regular readings and discussions, the group will focus on rhetoric or hermeneutics.
Feminist Reading Group (FRG)
Coordinators: James Faubion (Anthropology), Colleen Lamos and Thad Logan (English), and Livia Polanyi (Linguistics)
The FRG's main event was "Feminism Today: A Houston Conference." This day-long conference on April 12 brought together eighty feminist and queer theory scholars from Houston universities and colleges to examine current trends in gender studies and to discuss research interests. Designed to encourage critical dialogue and cooperation among local academics, the conference featured ten papers on feminist theory from a variety of disciplines, including economics (Diana Strassmann, Feminist Economics), philosophy (Cynthia Freeland, UH), modern literature (Elizabeth Gregory, UH; Michelle Taylor, Rice; and Audrey Colombe, UH), medieval studies (Gretchen Mieszkowski, UH-Clear Lake; Jane Chance, Rice; and Sumitra Duggirala, UH), and creative writing (Mylene Dressler, St. Thomas; and Mary Jo Mahoney, UH).
Ann Cvetkovich (UT-Austin) delivered the keynote address, "Activist, Queer, and Transnational Feminisms: State of the Art Visions." Cvetkovich focused on the appropriation and redeployment of images from mass culture, especially advertising imagery and celebrity icons, by contemporary lesbian activist artists such as Lesbian Avengers and Fierce Pussy. She argued that American national culture is refigured by the (literal and figurative) border-crossing activities of ethnic immigrants and sexual minorities, thus raising the promise and problems of transnationalism. Roundtable discussions followed, centering on the topics of "Multiple Feminisms" (moderated by Maria Gonzalez, UH), "Pedagogy" (Pauline Schloesser, Texas Southern), and "Queer Theory" (Jon Harned, UH-Downtown).
In another event, FRG welcomed back one of its distinguished founders, Jane Gallop (Wisconsin-Milwaukee), for a lecture entitled "Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment." Based upon her new book, Gallop's talk recounted her personal experience of the erotic forces within pedagogical relationships and of the ways that feminists have understood them. In conjunction with Gallop's visit, the FRG hosted an informal meeting with Gallop in which she answered questions concerning her view of increasingly conservative, repressive sexual harassment policies. Gallop's recent articles in Academe and differences provided the basis for discussion.
During the year, FRG broadened its scope to include lesbian and gay issues, and with the English department sponsored a lecture by Terry Castle (English, Stanford) on "Lesbianism and the Aesthetic: The Case of Mademoiselle de Maupin." Castle claimed that lesbian sexuality has occupied a prominent, although unacknowledged, place in nineteenth- and twentieth-century western art and literature. The lecture was attended by twenty-five students and faculty, and a similarly large group turned up for a subsequent meeting with Castle. Her book, The Apparational Lesbian, served as the focus of a debate concerning the representation of female homoeroticism in modern literary culture.
The mainstay of the FRG is its frequent meetings to discuss texts of interest the group. In addition to reading Gallop's essays and Castle's book, the group met to examine Carol Tavris's The Mismeasure of Woman, Naomi Cahn's "The Looseness of Legal Language: The Reasonable Woman Standard in Theory and in Practice," Bina Agarwal's A Field of One's Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia, Diana Fuss's Identification Papers, and Joan Scott's Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man. Discussion leaders included Diana Strassmann and, from English, Helena Michie, Susan Lurie, and Thad Logan. Attendance varied from a half dozen to twenty.
Among the themes the FRG plans to pursue in its 1997-98 readings and guest lectures will be feminist analyses of consumer mass culture. The FRG plans to invite Katha Pollit to speak about issues raised in her book, Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism. The FRG also intends to host another conference to develop and deepen the dialogue within the local community of feminist and gay scholars that it began with "Feminism Today."
Judaic Studies Workshop (JSW)
Coordinator: Paula Sanders (History)
The JSW sponsored two lectures. The first was Paula Sanders' "The Discovery of the Cairo Geniza: A Centennial Perspective," which thirty-one students, faculty, and members of the Houston community attended. Sanders related the discovery of the Cairo Geniza, a treasure trove of Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, and Arabic documents in the Ben Ezra synagogue in Old Cairo, Egypt, to the emergence of semitic philology as a scholarly discipline, to the culture of study-travel and pilgrimage by nineteenth-century Europeans, to trade in antiquities, and to the history of the Jews in nineteenth-century Egypt. Though most of the Geniza documents are Hebrew religious texts, a few are communal and private documents written in Judeo-Arabic. The study of these fragments during the past hundred years has revolutionized nearly every field of Jewish studies and has also created the new field of Geniza studies.
Joel Beinin (history, Stanford) presented the second lecture, "The Egyptian Jewish Business Elite in the Twentieth Century: Compradors or Pillars of the National Economy?" Since the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979 prompted nationalist Egyptian intellectuals to study the modern history of Egypt's Jews for the first time, Egyptians opposed to the treaty have produced a stream of writing on Egyptian Jewish history, including antagonistic, even anti-Semitic, economic histories of the Jewish business community. However, many in the Jewish business class traditionally saw themselves as Egyptians, and were strong opponents of political Zionism. Examining the partnerships among Jewish, Muslim, and Coptic Egyptian businessmen since the late nineteenth century, Beinin argued that both the identity of the Jewish business class and the effects of their economic activities are more complex than the comprador imagery of the nationalist Egyptian historical school or the traditional Zionist school, each of which regards the Jews as merely temporary sojourners in Egypt and not "real" Egyptians.
For 1997-98, the JSW proposes two events, a symposium on the history of the Cairo Geniza and Geniza studies, and a seminar on Geniza studies that will focus on the social and economic history of the later middle ages. Although the Judaic Studies Workshop has flagged in the past two years, owing largely to the sabbatical absences of interested faculty, the return of Michael Maas, David Nirenberg, and Paula Sanders (all in history) as well as the presence of new faculty whose interests are centrally located in Judaic studies is expected to reinvigorate the workshop.
Medieval Studies Workshop (MSW)
Coordinator: Linda Neagley, Art and Art History
The MSW co-sponsored four lectures with other humanities departments. A lecture by Thomas Shippey (humanities, St. Louis University) entitled "Tolkien and the Theory of Courage" was hosted with the English department and organized by Jane Chance, as was a lecture by Geraldine Heng (English, UT-Austin) on "Cannibalism, the First Crusade, and the Genesis of Arthurian Romance." Participating with Werner Kelber (religious studies) and his department, the MSW also sponsored a lecture by Mary Carruthers (Center for Research in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, New York University) entitled "Locus tabernaculi: Memory and Place in Monastic Meditation." Carruthers' research and publications have great interdisciplinary appeal, especially for students of history of art, intellectual history, and medieval religion, and the lecture was attended by faculty and students from Rice, the University of St. Thomas, and various religious institutions in Houston. In addition, with Albert Van Helden (history) as organizer, the MSW held a lecture by Edward Grant (history and philosophy of science, Indiana) on "Journey Through the Spheres: the Cosmos in the Middle Ages." Grant argued for the importance of Aristotelian cosmology in scholastic thought from the twelfth century, and showed how the Christianized Aristotelian cosmos was the central intellectual construct of the high middle ages.
During 1997-98, the MSW will work with Honey Meconi (Shepherd School) to plan an interdisciplinary symposium on Hildegard of Bingen. Scheduled for November 1999, the event is to commemorate the 900th anniversary of Hildegard's birth.
Nineteenth Century Enquiry (NICE)
Coordinator: Alan Grob (English)
Members of NICE chose nationalism as the topic for this year's meetings. Regular participants were Scott Derrick, Alan Grob, Thad Logan, Helena Michie, Robert Patten (English); Carl Caldwell, Gale Stokes, Martin Wiener, Jack Zammito (history); and Steve Crowell (philosophy). Bernard Aresu (French studies) and Rob Bledsoe (German and Slavic studies) also attended a number of sessions. Meetings were devoted to broadly interdisciplinary discussions of selected readings from both primary and secondary sources, including selections from key figures in the development of nationalism, such as Mazzini and Renan. The group also read selections from Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner, and Liah Greenfeld.
NICE hosted two speakers. The first was Harold Mah (history, Queen's University, Ontario), whose noted essay on the role of language in the formation of national identities in France and Germany, and whose current research on national identity in German culture seemed particularly fruitful for a group made of largely literary critics and historians. Mah gave a public lecture called "Impossible Hellas: German Identity under Affliction: Winckelmann to Thomas Mann," and subsequently participated in a workshop discussion of two of his essays, "The Epistemology of the Sentence: Language, Civility, and Identity in France and Germany, Diderot to Nietzsche," and "Phantasies of the Public Sphere: Rethinking the Habermas of Historians."
The second speaker was Joseph Childers (English, UC-Riverside), a new historicist specializing in the Victorian period, and currently studying immigration and the formation of "Englishness" in Victorian Britain. Entitled "The Malay at the door and Other Subjects," Childers' talk dealt with British immigration policies and attitudes toward immigrants. Childers also participated in a workshop discussion of Chadwick's Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain , the subject of a section in Childers's recent book. The discussion provided a good opportunity to see how literary critics deal with what once were regarded as purely historical materials.
Central Europe Study Group (CESG)
Coordinators: Gale Stokes (History) and Ewa Thompson (German and Slavic Studies)
The Central Europe Study Group hosted five luncheon meetings, two evening lectures, and the annual meeting of the Southwest Slavic Association. Together with faculty from the German department and from linguistics, faculty from the University of Houston, University of St. Thomas, North Harris County College, and Sam Houston State University regularly attended meetings, constituting audiences of about forty for evening lectures and eight to ten for luncheon meetings.
The topics of CESG lectures were largely historical and economic. Focusing on the transition to a market economy in Poland and Romania, Peter Mieszkowski (economics) spoke on the economist Michael Bernstam's analysis of the Polish economic recovery , expertise, and Constantin Popescu (Regia Autonoma de Transport Bucuresti, Romania) led a discussion of the state of public transportation in postcommunist Romania. Other issues were addressed by Klaus Aurisch (consul general, Republic of Germany) in his lecture on "Germany and East Central Europe," by Jan Rybicki (Krakow Pedagogical University) in his lecture, "The Art of Translation: Second Thoughts by a Practitioner," and by William Murchison (Dallas Morning News) in "After the Election: What Now?"
Jan Gross (history, New York University) lectured on the period of the Soviet-Nazi friendship (19393941), when the states of Central Europe were dismembered and their destruction was carried out in earnest. Gross detailed the Soviet takeover of eastern Poland, the disruption of societal networks, and the loss of hundreds of thousands of Polish lives through deportations and outright killings by the Soviet police and the military. Andrzej Wasko (Slavic and Baltic languages and literatures, University of Illinois-Chicago) explored the cultural formation called Sarmatism, which played a vital role in seventeenth-century Polish culture, and was misinterpreted by the Enlightenment thinkers in the eighteenth century. Wasko's current work reinterprets Sarmatism and its role in Polish history. Several articles based on CESG talks have been published in The Sarmatian Review, and they are available online at
. A new CESG member, Pamela Pavliscak (Fondren Library) has been instrumental in these developments.
Gale Stokes, assisted by graduate student Tanya Dunlap (history), organized a meeting of the Southwest Slavic Association at Rice on February 21-22. This association has been bringing together specialists on Russia, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe from the Southwest region annually for about twenty years. In the first of four sessions, Samuel Ramer (history, Tulane) examined the selection of physicians' assistants in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Russia and traced how educated women began to break into the specialty. In another session, Witold Lukaszewski (history, Sam Houston State) argued that the Central European states should be invited into NATO soon, provoking a discussion in which all the scholars of Russian or Soviet affairs opposed NATO expansion and all those dealing with East European subjects supported it. Presenters in the third session were Victor Mote and Harry Walsh (both of UH), who discussed the spatial myths Russians live by. The final session concerned various paths to economic transformation in Russia, and featured the keynote lecturer, James Millar (director of the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Institute at George Washington University). Millar argued that Russia's attempt at shock therapy had failed, to which the discussant, Paul Gregory (history, UH), made a variety of counter arguments.
Other events of the conference were a performance by the Houston International Folk Dance Balkan Singers and a Polish language production of Alexander Fredro's classic play Zemsta, which was produced in Baker College by Waclaw Mucha (German and Slavic studies).
Environmental Study Group (ESG)
Coordinator: Walter Isle (English)
Meeting weekly or biweekly, the ESG's sessions were well attended by faculty and students from all sectors of the campus. Regular participants included Arthur Few (space physics), Bill Leeman (geology), Paul Harcombe (ecology and evolutionary biology), Mark Wiesner (environmental science and engineering), Jenny Sisson (geology), Ron Soligo (economics), Alan Thornhill (ecology and evolutionary biology), Chelsea Valdes (undergraduate), Marjo Ave Lallemant (UH-Clear Lake), and Walter Isle. Others who attended occasionally were Steve Klineberg (sociology), Dale Sawyer (geology), and Tellen Bennett (undergraduate).
The group devoted itself to three areas of activity: readings and discussions, the preparation of a college course in environmental studies, and interaction with Rice's Environmental Strategic Planning Committee. Readings included Barry Lopez's Crossing Open Ground, Paul Hawken's The Ecology of Commerce, Daniel Quinn's Ishmael, David Orr's Ecological Literacy, and selected writings by environmental historians William Cronon, Richard White, and Donald Worster. The creation of an introductory course in environmental studies was led mainly by Arthur Few and Bill Leeman. The course will be offered as a Baker and Lovett course in the fall of 1997, and many in the study group are teaching it. A sequel is intended for the spring of 1998. The ESG is represented on the Environmental Studies Strategic Planning Committee by Harcombe, Wiesner, and Isle. The committee is developing a plan for environmental sciences and environmental studies at Rice that would coordinate environmental education and research activities across the campus, including a major with four tracks: environmental science, environmental engineering, policy studies, and environmental studies in humanities and social sciences. The Lovett/Baker course may provide a model for a common introductory course for all four tracks of the proposed major. During 1997-98, ESG will continue its three main areas of activity and also plans a series of lectures by several prominent scholars in environmental studies.
Late Editions (LE)
Edited by George Marcus (anthropology)
Late Editions: Cultural Studies for the End of the Century is series of annuals that has been supported by CSC since the project began in 1992. Each volume is produced through an interdisciplinary collaboration of scholars, organized through the anthropology department, on a yearly cycle. A process of annual production culminates in a collective editorial conference held in May of each year before the volumes are submitted in the fall to the University of Chicago Press, the series publisher. The rationale and theme of the series is to probe the transformations, both great and small, of this fin-de-siècle through experiments with the interview/dialogue form. The series seeks to provide an alternative and supplement to the standard scholarly essay, the authority of which has been provocatively critiqued in recent years. Inspired by an ethnographic method in anthropology that entails discussions with informed social actors, the pieces in LE volumes are intended to represent a variety of perspectives on contemporary cultures through such rhetorical strategies as dialogue and juxtapositions of multiple utterances.
During 1996-97, the seventh volume was prepared, the second one to be devoted to cultural producers, though this time not individuals but groups of artists, and especially in their relationships to large institutions in transformation, such as universities, corporations, states, and media companies. Much of LE seven is drawn from two events sponsored at Rice by the anthropology department. One event, funded by the TransArt Foundation, was "Artists In Trance," which brought Cuban and Venezuelan artists concerned with problems of violence, poverty, migration, and religion in contemporary Latin American cultures to campus from January through April. The artists' installations and performances were documented, as were their conversations with faculty, students, and members of Houston's Latin American community, and will be the basis for a major part of LE seven.
Another major part will be derived from the visit of the Ficto-Critics of Australia. In conjunction with Michael Taussig (anthropology, Columbia) LE sponsored joint conferences at Rice and a week-later at Columbia. A well-known movement of writers in Australia that includes many academics, Ficto-Critics have gained prominence in writing on contemporary Australian life through genres combining narrative and analysis, fact and fiction. Three of these writers, Stephen Muecke, Diane Losche, and Lesley Stern, whose work deals mostly with the Australian landscape and Australian multiculturalism, participated in both conferences, and their presentations were made in tandem with other writers working in a similar vein. At Rice, the Ficto-Critics were joined by Julie Taylor (anthropology), reading from her new book on the tango; Ryan Bishop (English, SMU), reading from a novel on contemporary Thailand; Katie Stewart (anthropology, UT-Austin), reading from her book on an Appalachian community; Luiz Soares (a Brazilian cultural critic), reading a memoir on Rio de Janeiro after military rule in Brazil; Mariella Pandolfi (comparative literature, Montreal), reading from her work on Italian village women; and Taussig, reading from a piece on the Chiapas revolt. Audiences of fifty to sixty people, including faculty and students from the University of Houston, attended.
In 1997-98, the eighth (and likely final) volume in the series will be produced. The annual collective editorial meeting in June was devoted to completing LE seven and planning LE eight.
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Depending upon individual faculty requests and the availability of funds, a number of visiting lecturers come each year in addition to those sponsored by workshops and study groups. Rice faculty who received CSC teaching-release fellowships also give lectures. Below are summaries of such lectures that occurred last year.
Topics in History
"Victorian Men Who Killed Women: Why They Did It, What Happened to Them, and What We Can Learn from Them"
by Martin Wiener (history, and CSC Fellow, 1995-96)
Wiener, currently writing a book on men and violence in nineteenth-century Britain, sought to remove several misconceptions about Victorian violence against women, little of which fit the "Jack the Ripper" stereotype. Most women killed by men in that era knew their killers, usually their suitors, lovers, husbands or ex-husbands, and the motives of their assailants were the familiar ones of domestic control, sexual jealousy, depression or outright insanity. Indeed, except for the absence of serial killers, the patterns of nineteenth-century femicide were not very different from today's. However, if there was much continuity in the forms of femicide, one important element of change was that the proportion of female victims of murder in the criminal record markedly increased in the course of the century. It is an open question whether this increase indicates a real increase in femicide or rather was the result of gradually increasing criminalization and prosecution. Both possibilities need further study, and scholars might particularly explore how cultural definitions of both "violence" and "masculinity" have changed and how these changes have impinged on each other. How, for example, has diminishing tolerance of violence affected gender relations, and how, contrariwise, has a rising relative valuation of women impacted the operations of criminal justice? To address such questions, the history of gender must move from being the history of women and become the study of the changing constructions and inter-relations of masculinity and femininity, of men and women.
"The Scopes Trial in History and Legend"
by Ron Numbers (history of medicine, Wisconsin); organized by Albert Van Helden (history)
Accounts of the 1924 Scopes trial, both in the historical literature and in textbooks, have stressed issues such as urban and rural cultural tensions, as well as northern and southern, leaving the impression that the basic issue was evolution versus creation in six literal days. Numbers showed, however, that the evolution question exercised people in urban areas and the North as much as in rural areas and the South. Reading from William Jennings Bryan's testimony at the trial, which reveals that Bryan believed in a metaphorical six days of creation, Numbers argued that in the 1920s most creationists in the United States believed in some form of an expanded time scale; only the Seventh Day Adventists believed in creation in six literal days. Not until the advent of scientific creationism in the 1960s did this latter view become that of most creationists. Questions following the lecture centered on the problem of how and why the generally accepted historical narrative of the Scopes trial has taken the form it now has.
"Here and Everywhere: Current Trends in the Social Studies of Science"
by Steven Shapin (sociology and science studies, UC-San Diego); organized by Van Helden and John Zammito (history)
Shapin explored how the social study of science, though remaining a relatively peripheral element in the discipline of sociology, has yet achieved robust results in its young career. Above all, it has established that the pursuit of science is characterized by mundane and local procedures, much unlike the textbook models of scientific method that dominated the philosophy and the popular perception of science a generation ago. All this work, usually crafted in careful case-studies of local achievements or problems in science, has, on the other hand, led to a central problem for future research resolution, namely, how such local knowledge achieves such rapid and successful universalization. Thus, if scientific knowledge is always the product of a particular "here," how does it come so readily to be accepted "everywhere"?
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Depending upon individual faculty requests and the availability of funds, a number of visiting lecturers come each year in addition to those sponsored by workshops and study groups. Rice faculty who received CSC teaching-release fellowships also give lectures. Below are summaries of such lectures that occurred last year.
Topics in African Studies
"The Power Within: Genres in Popular Culture"
by Johannes Fabian (history, Amsterdam); organized by Elias Bongmba (religious studies)
Calling attention to the present crises in Zaire and Rwanda, which underscore the need for extensive social and political change, Fabian argued that African communities can effect such change because their thought systems have been developed to address problems resulting from colonialism and the breakdown of the modern state. Indigenous religious movements, for example, have re-emerged in the twentieth century, and provide alternative avenues for spiritual practice and definitions of individual and community identity.
"Ethnicity versus Democracy and Nationalism in Rwanda, 18903996"
by Buluda Itandala (history, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania); organized by Atieno Odhiambo (history)
Itandala examined various definitions and historical usages of the terms ethnicity, democracy, and nationalism in North America, Europe, and Africa. German and successive Belgian colonialists in Rwanda identified with and granted higher status to the minority Tutsi. As a consequence, colonial ethnography invented and applied quaint usages of race and history to the Tutsi in contradistinction to the majority Hutu, who came to be regarded by both the Europeans and the Tutsi as "primitive" autochthones. With the emergence of the nationalist movement in the 1950s, the Belgians abandoned their erstwhile proteges and embraced the Hutu, handing over the governance of the state to a vengeful Hutu intelligentsia. The anti-Tutsi genocide which began in 1960 was ignored, denied, and even abetted by a neo-colonial France bent on sustaining its hegemony in postcolonial Francophone Africa.
"The Challenges of Land Tenure Reform in Africa"
by Hastings Okoth Ogendo (public law, Univerity of Nairobi, Kenya); organized by Odhiambo
Pinpointing the Foreign Jurisdictions Acts of the nineteenth century as the beginning the process through which the British acquired their right to tenure in their various African possessions, Ogendo argued that South Africa is presently required to deal with the legacies of these legislations as it undertakes programs of land reform. South Africa's options are (1) land reform, (2) land tenure reform, and (3) a comprehensive land reform program that rectifies wrongs from the last century, permits access to land for everyone, and addresses issues of equity within the wider framework of the evolving political economy . No precedents for comprehensive reform exist, Kenya having restricted itself to land tenure reform only, and Ethiopia having undertaken the path of land reform by giving land to the peasant associations. The likely beneficiaries of any scale of reform will be the urban dwellers in the former slums, such as Soweto, who at the very least will expect some security of tenure on their present plots.
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Depending upon individual faculty requests and the availability of funds, a number of visiting lecturers come each year in addition to those sponsored by workshops and study groups. Rice faculty who received CSC teaching-release fellowships also give lectures. Below are summaries of such lectures that occurred last year.
Topics in Arts and Letters
"The Manufacture of Disagreement"
by Jeffrey Perl (arts and humanities, UT-Dallas); organized by Richard Wolin
A leading scholar of literary modernism and the editor of Common Knowledge, Perl argued that many conventional intellectual disagreements prove upon closer inspection to be pseudo-disagreements. In one of his examples, he showed how political themes permeated the verse of symbolist poet and apostle of l'art pour l'art Stephane Mallarme. Professor Perl suggested that, similarly, highly contested questions of canon formation, not to mention the more recent dispute between modernists and postmodernists, could be viewed as instances of pseudo-disagreement.
"Nature, Artifice, and Power: Engineering and Absolutism in 17th-Century French Gardens"
by Chandra Mukerji (sociology, communications, and scientific studies, UC-San Diego); organized by Elizabeth Long (sociology)
Mukerji spoke about the relationship of the gardens of Versailles to the territorial ambitions and self-definition of the absolutist French state in the seventeenth century. The landscaping itself developed out of military technology, inasmuch as the artisanship was part of Colbert's campaign to sponsor French design and manufacture for export. Mukerji linked the material infrastructure of the gardens to their symbolic power as a representation of the monarchy that Louis XIV was crafting, and, moreover, to the entire social world that the king and his advisors were trying to reshape. The talk demonstrated that gardens, in the case of Versailles, were creations of genuine political importance, making it understandable why Louis gave so much attention to planning ambassadorial promenades through the gardens, and why other absolutist monarchs imported that style of garden to be the centerpiece for the states that they, in imitation of the French, were so eager to establish for themselves.
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Depending upon individual faculty requests and the availability of funds, a number of visiting lecturers come each year in addition to those sponsored by workshops and study groups. Rice faculty who received CSC teaching-release fellowships also give lectures. Below are summaries of such lectures that occurred last year.
Topics in Religious Studies
"Poetry, Visionary Revelation and Philosophy: An Exploration into Songs of Realization in Indo-Tibetan Culture"
by Steven D. Goodman (California Institute for Integral Studies, San Francisco); organized by Anne Klein (religious studies)
Goodman began with an overview of the role of song and poetry in Indian religion, introducing the figure of Sarasvati, beloved by both Hindus and Buddhists as the embodiment of poetic song. To illuminate some of the ways that song and other art forms conveyed religious and philosophical meaning during rituals, Goodman incorporated into his presentation several works of Buddhist art, his own and others' translations of poetry by contemporary and ancient Tibetan yogis, and recordings of Tibetan religious chant. Goodman outlined the context of these artful representations by surveying several genres of Indian and Tibetan poetics, which encode visionary experiences. In philosophical terms, these experiences manifest the ultimate source, variously named in sutric and tantric traditions as emptiness, primordial purity, ground of all, and so forth. The composition and performance of these songs instance a special form of philosophical inquiry, one which has radical transformation as its chief purpose.
"Gender Ambiguity in the Cult of the Goddess Inanna/Ishtar"
by Anne Draffkorn Kilmer,(Assyriology, UC-Berkeley); organized by Scott Noegel (religious studies)
Kilmer expounded on the ancient Mesopotamian deity Ishtar (her Sumerian name was Inanna), the goddess of sexual love, war, and the planet Venus, and the most important female deity of ancient Mesopotamia at all periods. Myths show that Ishtar lacked children and a permanent spouse, changed humans into animals, traveled to and from the underworld, was colorful (perhaps even spotted), and, though responsible for fertility, was iconographically and textually of ambiguous gender. Cultic celebrations included juggling, sword swallowing, violent dancing, raucous laughter, cross dressing, and illicit, public sexual activity. Kilmer reviewed older interpretations of the origins of Ishtar's gender ambiguity, and suggested a new factor in the development of the complex construct of this divinity, namely the ancient connection between Ishtar and the spotted hyena, on whose back Ishtar is often depicted. Kilmer presented slides to illustrate how, like Ishtar, the hyena also displays apparent (not genuine) hermaphroditic characteristics, violent behavior, and raucous laughter.
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