Pathways
A bust of Wamsutta, a Wampanoag leader who was imprisoned by the colonists at Plymouth.
Today is Thanksgiving, a day often taught in schools with myths about happy relations between the Plymouth colonists and American Indians. A segment on NPR offers useful tips about how to offer a more realistic genealogy of Thanksgiving and its meaning to the Wampanoag with your children. (In related news, the Mayflower is currently undergoing restoration.)
A fascinating genealogy of eyebrow styling has some interesting anecdotes, including the Greek lyric poet Theocritus’ preference for unibrows and the tradition of pencilling eyebrows in Japan, which dates back to the 8th century.
One of the “core characteristics” of late modern science is the unique sociology of its sources of funding. A special collection of articles explores various historical backdrops that give new insight into how our current funding mechanisms for scientific research developed.
A recent and important conference on the “deep history” of slavery seeks to put scholars of ancient and modern slavery in dialogue while avoiding “facile assumptions about the genealogical relationships between ancient and modern slavery.” Papers took various approaches to this dialogue, including “how early modern British thinkers used Greek myths in their discussions of Atlantic slavery” and a juxtaposition of “Galatians in the Roman Empire and Rhode Islanders in the Atlantic.”
If you are like me, you will have encountered people in your social circles who wish to read your birth chart or who have a casual habit of reading horoscopes. What is the place of astrology in the modern world? Perhaps you are, like me, more inclined to agree with Adorno’s assessment that astrology appeals to “persons who do not any longer feel that they are the self-determining subjects of their fate.” But is this so different from the endless slate of superhero movies every summer?
Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister.
Jawaharlal Nehru would have turned 130 on the 14th of this month. Avijit Pathak reflects on “Nehruvian modernity” and its contrast with the modern present of the Indian state.
Will the future include people married to robots? One Polish researcher, Maciej Musiał, thinks about these and related questions in his new book, Enchanting Robots. But it is also a reflection upon the limits and possibilities of human emotion.
In an important new work, Saba Mahmood criticizes Charles Taylor’s view of Latin Christendom in his landmark A Secular Age. She argues that Christianity cannot be understood without a history of its encounters—often violent—with others. “These encounters,” she observes, “did not simply leave Christianity untouched but transformed it from within, a transformation that should be internal to any self-understanding of Christianity. Omission of this story is akin to the omission of the history of slavery and colonialism from accounts of post-Enlightenment modernity—an omission that enables a progressivist notion of history and normative claims about who is qualified to be ‘modern’ or ‘civilized.’” A stimulating and important challenge to Christians and scholars alike to create a new genealogy of Christianity that does not exclude the non-Christian from its reckonings.
We all know people who are deeply affected by loneliness. Given the epidemic scale of this painful condition, it is tempting to seek medical answers to its effects. But Fay Bound Alberti argues that the genealogy of loneliness tells us this is the wrong approach. For instance, in the nineteenth-century usage of the word, “Loneliness usually denoted places rather than people: a lonely castle, a lonely tree, or wandering ‘lonely as a cloud’ in Wordsworth’s poem of 1802.” In this way a “lonely” place could be entered and left, and loneliness was a condition one entered rather than fell into. A good read.
