“Cul­ture” is a slip­pery con­cept, used in many dif­fer­ent ways by his­to­ri­ans, anthro­pol­o­gists and econ­o­mists. Jones’ book is more a sur­vey than the cri­tique implied by the title, but it is an extreme­ly use­ful and well-pre­sent­ed sur­vey. I pre­fer this, since it is best to start off with some idea of who has thought and said what about the sub­ject before plung­ing into debates. Pre­sump­tions about cul­ture, espe­cially about whether it deter­mines how peo­ple act eco­nom­i­cally, or mere­ly shapes itself on the basis of how peo­ple must act eco­nom­i­cally, under­lie all sorts of the­o­ries and descrip­tions in the three fields. Usu­ally these pre­sump­tions are shared by some group of thinkers with­out them being explic­itly stat­ed. Argu­ments between dif­fer­ent groups, with dif­fer­ent pre­sump­tions, usu­ally result in con­fu­sion. But a num­ber of works, in all three dis­ci­plines, either illus­trate or make explic­it par­tic­u­lar ideas of culture’s rela­tion to behav­iour and economies. Schol­ars have tak­en their cues from these sem­i­nal works, and pol­i­cy-mak­ers adhered to any of sev­eral con­tra­dic­tory atti­tudes gen­er­ated by them. Some have been down­right sil­ly (such as “the end of his­tory” and “clash of civ­i­liza­tions” tom-fool­ery). Jones presents most of them fair­ly dis­pas­sion­ately, but he is obvi­ously impa­tient with the stu­pider ones, and does not hide it. Of spe­cial inter­est to me is his sen­si­ble dis­cus­sion of the “Asian Val­ues” mys­tique, pro­moted by many East Asian econ­o­mists and politi­cians, and often uncrit­i­cally accept­ed else­where. (He cites Steve Muhlberg­er and myself in this dis­cus­sion, so I could hard­ly fail to find it inter­est­ing.) On the whole, Jones gets the horse in front of the cart rather than the oth­er way round. He plumps for com­mon-sense cau­sa­tion when it is pos­si­ble, and holds back his con­clu­sions when cau­sa­tion can­not be dis­cerned, rather than appeal to enig­matic col­lec­tive properties.

In the jar­gon of sci­ence fic­tion fan­dom, Rich Coad is pub­lish­ing a “ser­con fanzine” — an ama­teur pub­li­ca­tion that empha­sizes seri­ous dis­cus­sion of sci­ence fic­tion lit­er­a­ture and issues, rather than social chat­ter, auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal writ­ings, or in-group humour. Long before the exis­tence of blog­ging or the web, fanzines were the vehi­cle that car­ried much of the same func­tions and sen­si­bil­ity. A few sci­ence fic­tion fanzines of the old-fash­ioned print-on-paper vari­ety still sur­vive, but few­er still are “ser­con”. There’s a spe­cial plea­sure in hold­ing the stuff in your hands, and my hat goes off to Rich for fac­ing the daunt­ing bar­ri­ers of high postal rates and com­put­er-gen­er­a­tion apa­thy. Read more »

When I returned from up north, I found this book in the mail — a won­der­ful gift from my friend Fil­ip Marek in Prague. It’s a beau­ti­ful, high­ly detailed guide to the medieval, renais­sance and baroque archi­tec­tural trea­sures of Prague. Fil­ip knows how much I love those build­ings, and how much this is a treat for me. The above pho­to is from else­where, but it gives you some idea of Prague’s charms, if you haven’t been there.

I would like to see every­one involved with urban reform and with demo­c­ra­tic activism to read this book. There is a pow­er­ful under­cur­rent of change going on in both the Unit­ed States and Cana­da, def­i­nitely some­thing mov­ing up from the grass roots and ignored by both the media and the elite polit­i­cal drones. It’s some­thing far more cre­ative and sig­nif­i­cant than a mere flaky fash­ion for “anti-glob­al­ism” demon­stra­tions, with which the read­er might at first con­fuse it. It’s the fact that peo­ple — ordi­nary peo­ple — are start­ing to ques­tion the ortho­dox­ies they have been taught about how things “have to be”, and real­iz­ing that their self-inter­est, as well as their future, depends on re-invig­o­rat­ing local eco­nomic and polit­i­cal pow­er. You would nev­er guess it from fol­low­ing the media, but Amer­i­cans and Cana­di­ans are start­ing to shake off the pas­siv­ity and mor­bid fatal­ism that their rulers have ener­get­i­cally cul­ti­vated. They’ve begun to notice that Wal-Mart mov­ing into your neigh­bour­hood pro­duces pover­ty, not pros­per­ity, that North Amer­i­can soci­ety has been rapid­ly hemor­ag­ing cash into a “glob­al” empire of multi­na­tion­als-kings-dic­ta­tors, and that if they don’t do some­thing about it they are going to become help­less pau­pers. Shu­man describes some of the things that peo­ple have been doing, most­ly in small scale entre­pre­neur­ial and social action, to turn the tide. His analy­sis of the issues and process­es is not entire­ly accu­rate — he still suf­fers from the con­fu­sion of cat­e­gor­i­cal ter­mi­nol­ogy, such as the idi­otic “left-right” con­cept, that crip­ples reform think­ing — but he is def­i­nitely on the right track. Read more »

This is an excel­lent book, which demon­strates that his­to­ri­ans do not have to be sequestered in con­ti­nen­tal ghet­tos. Allsen is able to cite the Armen­ian and Geor­gian Chron­i­cles, the clas­sics of Indi­an and Per­sian lit­er­a­ture, and the vast bureau­cratic doc­u­men­ta­tion of Chi­na with the same ease and famil­iar­ity as when he cites stan­dard Euro­pean sources. “Eura­sia” actu­ally means some­thing to him. In oth­er words, the man is mod­ern. With this kind of atti­tude, he is capa­ble of address­ing a phe­nom­e­non that oth­er his­to­ri­ans have ignored: the Roy­al Hunt. This insti­tu­tion — which often called up an impres­sive chunk of a society’s resources — per­sisted as a con­tin­u­ously inter­con­nected phe­nom­e­non from the ear­li­est antiq­uity to near-mod­ern times. It demon­strates that the whole super­con­ti­nent of Afro-Eura­sia has been a cul­tural con­tin­uum through­out record­ed his­tory, with ideas and cus­toms trav­el­ing back and forth from end to end to end. Allsen tries to get some sort of han­dle on how and why the rulers of states engaged in spec­tac­u­lar col­lec­tive hunt­ing expe­di­tions and main­tained vast “game parks”, a cus­tom which tran­scended all the bar­ri­ers of empire, lan­guage, ecosys­tem, and reli­gion. His work has no “the­ory” behind it, only a relent­less curios­ity and a respect for the sources. The only defi­ciency that I found was that he seemed to nev­er ask the ques­tion “what hap­pened to the meat?”. It’s my hunch that he could have reached a more com­plete under­stand­ing of the phe­nom­e­non if he had explored the issues of who got to eat the vast quan­ti­ties of meat that these hunts pro­duced, how it was dis­trib­uted, and how this dis­tri­b­u­tion served social and polit­i­cal ends. I’ve noticed that there is a sim­i­lar absense of the ques­tion in stud­ies of Rome’s “games”.

This is an omnibus vol­ume pre­sent­ing Robert Hein­lein’s first four “juve­nile” nov­els, orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished by Scrib­n­er’s in 1947, 1948, 1949, and 1950. Hein­lein wrote twelve sci­ence fic­tion nov­els for teenagers, and put more care and artistry into them than most writ­ers put into seri­ous adult fic­tion. Their impact has been aston­ish­ing, and they remain wide­ly read long after their sci­ence and “futu­ri­ty” has become out­dat­ed. They were tremen­dous­ly lib­er­at­ing for young read­ers, espe­cial­ly when you judge them in the con­text of North Amer­i­can soci­ety when they were writ­ten. Unlike any author writ­ing for young peo­ple, up to that time, Hein­lein treat­ed his read­ers with hon­esty and respect, as well as pro­vid­ing them with a rich intel­lec­tu­al feast. Hein­lein strug­gled with his edi­tors, who con­stant­ly pan­icked over the pos­si­ble “unsuit­abil­i­ty” of his treat­ment and sub­ject mat­ter. But they were devoured by libraries, and thus were avail­able to peo­ple (like me) who were in no posi­tion to buy books. Scrib­n­er’s pub­lished them in a hand­some for­mat, with illus­tra­tions of great artis­tic mer­it by Clif­ford Geary. I came to them when they were start­ing to show their age, but their “sense of won­der” and their moral impact remained vivid. Cit­i­zen of the Galaxy, for exam­ple, was one of the three books that most stim­u­lat­ed my life-long fas­ci­na­tion with the issue of free­dom and slavery.
 
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16317. [2] (Arthur Conan Doyle) A Scan­dal In Bohemia [sto­ry]
16318. (Charles Lamb) On the Tragedies of Shake­speare [arti­cle]
16319. (Andrew Cur­ry) Raiders or Traders? [arti­cle]
16320. (Stephen Jay Schnei­der –ed.) 501 Movie Stars [arti­cle]
16321. (Will McLean) [blog A Com­mon­place Book] The 14^th Cen­tu­ry Social Pyra­mid [arti­cle] Read more »

Nov­el­ist Bar­bara King­solver and her fam­ily med­i­tate on their efforts to feed them­selves out­side of what I call “cor­po­rate com­mu­nism” — the glob­al­ized and col­lec­tivized sys­tem of agri­cul­ture that is rapid­ly destroy­ing health, envi­ron­ment and free­dom on this plan­et. King­solver doesn’t use my ter­mi­nol­ogy, and con­fines her­self to imme­di­ate issues of per­sonal health, aes­thet­ics, ani­mal ethics, and local eco­nomic vital­ity. But the book is use­ful back­ground for the kind of issues that inter­est me, as well as being enter­tain­ingly writ­ten. The book doesn’t have the sanc­ti­mo­nious tone that ham­pers much that is writ­ten on the sub­ject. King­solver knows that real fam­i­lies have to make eco­nomic choic­es under the con­straint of shrink­ing finan­cial resources, and prac­ti­cal real­ity. She is a strong advo­cate of the “eat local / eat sea­sonal” move­ment, which lies at the crux of her strat­egy, and takes every occa­sion to point out that both econ­omy and plea­sure tend to be max­i­mized by it.