non-Western Peoples Research Articles

Cultural complexity and religion: Persistent interaction and conceptual order in Mekeo society, Papua New Guinea1

Although there have been attempts to question the notion of the world of non-Western people as essentially religious and symbolic, there has simultaneously been a widespread tendency to study these in terms taken from a religious vocabulary such as mana, taboo, totemism, magic and sorcery. Using the Mekeo of Papua New Guinea as an example, this article suggests that we see culture as a complex dynamic system in which persistent interaction produces emergent properties that are symbolically elaborated. Thus, there are no universal contents of categories, but only universal principles of relating simple rules to emergent properties. Every system creates its own reality as a praxis-space inscribed into the environment. From this, it is concluded that we move comparisons from categorical content to conceptual principles. Doing so we find that ‘sorcery’ is about transcending the limitations imposed by locally defined categories on everyday life.

Biometrics and anthropometrics: the twins of Turkish modernity

ABSTRACT In the first half of the twentieth century, eugenic debates and policies revolved around positive (encouraging the reproduction of ‘superior’ individuals) and negative (preventing the reproduction of ‘inferior’ individuals) applications for the purpose of improving hereditary characteristics and preventing social problems. However, their particular manifestations varied because eugenic agendas responded differently to putative social problems in different local contexts. Despite the wealth of scholarly studies on eugenics, particularly in Germany and the United States, eugenic debates in Turkey have so far not received any attention. The significance of eugenics in the Turkish context stems from its conflation with republican modernization efforts. While Turkish republican reformers were diligently searching for anthropometric proof of the whiteness, Europeanness and ancientness of Turks, they also supported biometric scholarship that proposed eugenic measures to protect and improve recently ‘discovered’ historical essences. At a time when western eugenicists were classifying non-western peoples as inferior, Turkish reformers creatively adopted the methods and vocabulary of race science to establish the Turks’ innate ability to modernize. In order to demonstrate the wide appeal of eugenics in the Turkish context, Ergin presents findings from a content analysis of educational conferences organized by the government between 1938 and 1941, and argues that the future-oriented project of biometrics was as important as the past-oriented project of anthropometrics for the formulation of Turkishness in negotiation with race and modernity.

A Future for Ethnographic Film?

ETHNOGRAPHIC FILM IS A CONTESTED GENRE, not unlike the documentary. The majority opinion is that an film is any documentary that focuses on non-Western people (see Heider). The adjective ethnographic is used in a very loose manner, similar to the way psychological or historical is applied to a film. Few people expect a psychological film to be a serious rendering of the constructs of psychology or for the maker of the film to be a professionally trained psychologist. As a consequence, many films screened at places such as the American Anthropological Association or the Margaret Mead festival are documentaries made by professional filmmakers who have little or no training in anthropology. I have argued for a more restricted approach-one that confines the genre to the work of academic anthropologists. In my book Picturing Culture, I articulated a fantasy version of this position. To begin ... a moral tale for anthropologists, a fantasy in which an cinema exists-not documentaries about anthropological subjects, but films designed by anthropologists to communicate insights. It is a well-articulated genre distinct from the conceptual limitations of realist documentary and broadcast journalism. It borrows conventions and techniques from the whole of cinema-fiction, documentary, animation and experimental. A multitude of film styles vie for prominence-equal to the number of theoretical positions found in the field. There are general audience films produced for television as well as highly sophisticated works designed for professionals. While some films intended for a general audience are collaboratively made with professional filmmakers, solely professional anthropologists, who use the medium to convey the results of their studies and ethnological knowledge, produce most. University departments regularly teach the theory, history, practice and criticism of communications-verbal, written and pictorial-enabling scholars from senior professors to graduate students to select the most appropriate mode in which to publish their work. There are a variety of venues where these works are displayed regularly and serve as the basis for scholarly discussion. Canons of criticism exist that allow for a critical discourse about the ways in which anthropology is realized pictorially. A low-cost distribution system for all these products is firmly established. Videotapes/CD-ROMs/DVDs are as common as books in the libraries of anthropologists, and the internet and world wide web occupy a place of some prominence as an resource. Needless to say, the fantasy has remained just that. I see no reason to assume things will change much, although with the advent of prosumer three-chip digital cameras and the ease of computer editing, more anthropologists are delving into video production. Having lived through a number of major technological changes, beginning with cable television and sync-sound Super 8mm cameras, which both promised radical departures from the norm, I am not one to put much faith in what might be called techno-salvation. A change in technology will not bring about the kind of changes I am interested in because the problems are not technical. They are conceptual. To accomplish the task I have proposed, anthropologists will have to divorce themselves from the economic realities of the commercial documentary world. Anthropological filmmaking would have to become a scholarly activity with no commercial potential, similar to the way scholars write books published by scholarly publishers. Academics never assume that their publishing efforts will produce a living wage. It is now possible for scholars to experiment without obtaining large grants that require the production of materials designed either for the classroom or for public television, nor are they forced to hire professional crews whose goals are often at odds with those of a scholar. …

Pathways to Meaning-Making Through Leisure-Like Pursuits in Global Contexts

This paper incorporates international and multicultural perspectives on meaning- making through leisure-like pursuits, by acknowledging voices of non-western people including Asians, Middle-Easterners, Indigenous persons, Africans, and South Americans, in addition to some dominant Euro-North American perspectives. Based on a literature review and content analysis and synthesis, major pathways linking leisurelike pursuits to meaning-making are identified, specifically, their roles in facilitating: (a) positive emotions and well-being; (b) positive identities, self-esteem, and spirituality; (c) social and cultural connections and a harmony; (d) human strengths and resilience; and (e) learning and human development across the life-span. More generally, however, in people's quest for a meaningful life, the processes of meaning-making through leisure-like engagements involve both remedying the bad and enhancing the good. Achieving a more balanced understanding of leisure-like engagements and meaning-making as a global phenomenon is implied and advocated.

Mixed Metaphors: Dynamic Modernities in Southeastern North America

The concept of modernity has played an essential role in the development of anthropological archaeology. Providing the philosophical foundation upon which both culture historical and processual archaeologies were constructed, the application of theories based in modernism has led to the persistence of essentialist notions concerning the archaeological records of both Western and non-Western peoples. Examining archaeological materials from the Muskogee Creek peoples of interior Southeastern North America, I contend that previous conceptualizations of modernity lack sufficient nuance to adequately address the diversity of cultural practices among the post-contact Creeks (circa A.D. 1550–1830). Rather than the dichotomous perspective of Western moderns and indigenous primitives that predominates, recent archaeological research in Southeastern North America reveals a cultural milieu in which dynamic, contested modernities were created by both the colonizers and the colonized.

Letters

50 Historically Speaking March/April 2008 Letters Rethinking the West To the Editors: I have read with some bewilderment the debate between John M. Headley and Professors Constantin Fasolt, John Hobson, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam in your issue of November /December last. They appear to be discussing diree distinguishable questions: 1.Whether Western civilization is a good tiling or a bad? 2.Whether Western civilization exists in a history that can be recounted without merging it with die histories of other civilizations? 3.Whether the claim, made in the 18thcentury West, to have established rights and values applicable to all humans has equivalents in the intellectual and moral histories of other civilizations? The first question appears entirely futile; the second only a litde less so. I would really like to hear some answers to the third. Yours in some irritation, J.G.A. Pocock Johns Hopkins University To the Editors: I am quite disturbed by the debate over John Headley's essay "Western Exceptionalism and Universality Revisited" in the November/December 2007 issue. Headley himself engages in intemperate accusations—I know no reputable Ottoman, Chinese , or world historians who would relegate Western civilization to "a great black pit . . . chained in Danteesque feasting upon its own evil being" (although some historians of Africa and Native-American peoples might indeed wish this in return for what imperialism visited on those regions). Still, the responses to Headley's claims that the West is unique in advocating universal values are not always helpful. Sanjay Subrahmanyam is quite right that Headley's accounts of Islam and India, mentioning only one individual per civilisation (Akbar, Mencius) do not provide sound contrasts. Constantin Fasolt cleverly takes apart the oxymoron of "exceptional Western universalism." AndJohn Hobson correctly points out that Europe was not so isolated or exceptional as Headley would have us believe. Yet all of these replies seem engaged in a kind of oneupmanship (which Headley's essay admittedly beChinese royal court scene, from Martino Martini, De bello tartárico historia (1655). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. gins), an odd quarrel over priorities, exceptionalism, and who did what when. Yet surely the point of the new world history is not merely to replace the old claims of Western civilizational superiority with a list of "firsts" or "equal points" by non-Western societies. Rather, the point is to better understand how interactions among all the major societies of the globe contributed to making the world we inhabit today. Each society was unique in its own ways, and made essential contributions to science, government, law, economics, and philosophy. The old "Western civ" approach tended to treat only the contributions of the West, starting widi classical Greece, as having lasting value, while the contributions of non-Western peoples were seen as emanations or accidents that only achieved real importance in Western hands. Thus Bacon's famous saying that three critical inventions changed the world—printing, the compass, gunpowder—used to be transmitted to students without noting not only that all three were invented by China centuries before their use in Europe, but also that the very saying itself was borrowed from China's traditional catalogue of the four great inventions: printing, paper, gunpowder, and the compass. The new world history seeks more accurately to show how the modern age arose from a mix of major accomplishments in varied times in varied societies , a mix in which the West played a very modest role until 1700 or so. If we are to understand the truth about the Renaissance—that it was not merely a revival of learning based on "lost" classical texts, but was in fact the result of Europe's encounter with a very active and creative tradition of Muslim scholarship combining Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and Arabic insights, which was a consequence of the Spanish Reconquista, the Crusades, and the decline of Byzantium—then it is necessary for history texts to spend rather more time on Byzantium, Muslim societies and learning, and the political and economic histories of places from Morocco to Japan. If that means less emphasis on the Renaissance itself, then that is the price of broadening historical understanding. It is not an attack on the...

Images of the Wildman Inside and Outside Europe

Originally a figure of folklore, the European wildman gained prominence as a literary and artistic figure in the late Middle Ages, and in this form has commonly been interpreted as exercising a definite influence on later European representations of non-western peoples, non-human primates, and pre-sapiens hominids. Comparing the European image with wildman images encountered among indigenous peoples outside of Europe, this essay comprises a critical review of such arguments. Focusing on physical and behavioural attributes, consideration is first given to similarities and differences between European and non-European wildmen, paying particular attention to images recorded among small-scale societies in Asia. Turning to the reconstructions of palaeoanthropology and the objects of cryptozoology, it is then shown how reducing representations of ancient humans and modern wildmen to a discursive survival of the European mediaeval figure obscures both the radical transformation of the European image in later centuries and the independent existence of comparable non-western images.

Eating Time: Capitalist History and Pastoralist History among Samburu Herders in Northern Kenya

This article examines food and eating practices as a central domain for understanding the changing politics of everyday life for Samburu pastoralists in northern Kenya. The analysis engages with longstanding debates concerning the historical models applied by western analysts to non-western peoples, as well as contemporary issues concerning the contours of ethnography within the context of global processes. Until recent times Samburu were wealthy livestock keepers, with a central cultural emphasis on a pastoral diet of milk, meat and blood. Patterns of provisioning, eating and food sharing constituted a domain densely packed with core cultural values, and thickly entangled webs of social relations. Over the past several decades, however, there has been a significant decline in the Samburu livestock economy. A diet centrally constituted of livestock products is now impossible for most Samburu, while problematizing those wide-ranging social and cultural domains closely entwined with food and eating. Thus, food and eating practices have become a crucial site where Samburu both experience and shape aspects of change, as well as an important indigenous historical idiom through which they understand their own social transformations. I argue that a model of Samburu history centred upon food effectively situates Samburu within broader political-economic forces without subjugating the agency and the meanings of Samburu actors to those concerns most centrally raised by attention to western notions of modernity and global processes. An approach centred upon the mundane realities of everyday life has a value in forging a unique and meaningful alternative to western models of change.

Historical knowledge, historical error: a contemporary guide to practice

In past thirty years, historians have broadened scope of their discipline to include many previously neglected topics and perspectives. They have chronicled language, madness, gender, and sexuality and have experimented with new forms of presentation. They have turned to histories of non-Western peoples and to troubled relations between the West and rest. Allan Megill welcomes these developments, but he also suggests that there is now confusion among historians about what counts as a justified account of past. In Knowledge, Historical Error, Megill dispels some of confusion. Here, he discusses issues of narrative, objectivity, and memory. He attacks what he sees as irresponsible uses of evidence while accepting art of speculation, which incomplete evidence forces upon historians. Along way, he offers succinct accounts of epistemological road historians have traveled from Herodotus and Thucydides through Leopold von Ranke and Alexis de Tocqueville, and on to Hayden White, Natalie Zemon Davis, and Lynn Hunt.

Landscapes of Devils: Tensions of Place and Memory in the Argentinean Chaco

Landscapes of Devils is a beautiful evocation of the history of Argentina’s western Toba people (also known as the Toba-Pilagá) from the late nineteenth century to the present. The author shows how the harsh climate of the Chaco Boreal, at the center of the South American continent, intertwined with memories of places and events among the Tobas, who prior to their defeat by the Argentine army in the early twentieth century were one of the most feared indigenous groups of the region. Through the natives’ understanding of the past, it is possible to understand their complex history as sugar plantation workers in Salta and as subjects evangelized by the British Anglican Church. In the process, historians can benefit from seeing the historical development of the region through the eyes of its indigenous peoples.Gastón Gordillo asserts that memory, for the Toba, is related as much to places as it is to the passage of time. He divides Toba memory into three different places: the bush that is not controlled by whites and where the “ancients” roamed, the sugar plantation of San Martín del Tabacal in Salta (northern Argentina) where the Tobas worked at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the Anglican mission established in 1930. Only in the late 1960s did time change again, when plantation mechanization eliminated the need for unskilled indigenous laborers such as the Toba. Since then, they have remained in their poverty-stricken settlements in Formosa province.Although his prose is bit clunky at times, and laden with complex nouns, Gordillo shows well the contradictions of each space and time in Tobas historical memory. The Indians today see the bush both as a place of freedom and of poverty, where benevolent devils roam. The “ancient ones,” their ancestors, lived there in freedom, though the Toba recognize that they did not have many material things that they have now. The sugar plantation, in turn, was a place of sexual excess, of backbreaking and dangerous work, and of a surfeit of consumer goods. It was there, close to the unfamiliar mountains and the jungle, that the evil devils resided. The missions, established by the Anglicans in the Tobas’ home territory of Formosa, were also imbued with ambivalent meanings. The Tobas had to submit to a different kind of moral and physical discipline and live in permanent housing. However, the missionaries protected the Indians from state violence and converted them to a religion that the majority apparently adopted happily.For historians, the book offers both a useful overview of the history of this largely ignored territory and a valuable indigenous perspective on historical processes. The author based his research largely on oral histories and did not consult primary historical documents. Nor does he cite all of the available research on the Toba (for example, James Saeger’s excellent and highly relevant The Chaco Mission Frontier [Univ. of Arizona Press, 2000]), but that is not the major strength of this work. Rather, it will be very useful for ethnohistorians who want to imagine how indigenous peoples create historical memories and their own histories. Scholars will find value in these alternate renderings of a process — the integration of indigenous peoples into the plantation complex — that has been well studied by a host of social scientists and historians. Gordillo’s case study can also be read in dialogue with Michael Taussig’s ideas about the devil and commodity fetishism. Gordillo shows great sensitivity in showing how non-Western people imagine their own history. Historians who do research on indigenous peoples, whether in the Chaco or elsewhere, need to take his work into account.

Narratives of self-assertion: representations of the western Other in the works of the Uzbek author Abdulhamid Sulaymon Cholpan, 1897 – 1938

This article examines the portrayal and discursive function of the western Other in the literary works of Abdulhamid Sulaymon Cholpan (1897 – 1938) of Uzbekistan, by locating his narratives at the intersection of Russian and Soviet rule in Central Asia. It argues that the western Other appears in contradictory roles in Cholpan's literary texts, with some of his literary narratives expressing an admiration for European material progress and value systems and others displaying sharp criticism of its imperialistic objectives in non-western regions. The article further argues that despite these differences in the way the western Other is represented, Cholpan's literary writings can be considered as a counter-discursive practice, directed against both the established traditional culture and the colonial authority. However, Cholpan's literary narratives also often contribute to the construction of similar Orientalist images created by westerners about non-western people by describing ‘backward’ and ‘primitive’ aspects of Central Asian society using the very same language and discourse of Orientalism.

Some Things We Know about Aliens

The alien is one of SF's core motifs, often discussed as the Other of the Human. One might think, then, that the very idea would allow SF artists limitless creativity, with an opportunity to imagine anything at all that is 'not human'. However, at least since the publication of Stanislaw Lem's "Solaris", the question is continually raised: is it truly possible to imagine the not-human, or does anthropomorphism subtly shape every attempt to escape the human image? SF has been the niche of culture where philosophical questions about the alien, and the possibility of escaping anthropocentrism, have been explored most thoroughly. An examination of its vast literature reveals that this supposedly freely imagined strangeness of most aliens is modelled on terrestrial beings whose marginalized status is a cause of deep anxiety about rights and claims regarding property, animals, machines, women, children, and non-Western peoples.

Anthropology and the development of the Transpersonal Movement: Finding the Transpersonal in Transpersonal Anthropology

Transpersonal Anthropology (hereafter ‘TA’) is a growing field within Social Anthropology. It has many similarities with Transpersonal Psychology and, I believe, can offer useful ideas and approaches to study. In particular, it offers a much wider view of human experience than Western psychology because it is based on non-Western peoples, their concepts, philosophies, ways of life and experiences. Secondly, Social Anthropology as a whole has undergone much soul-searching and analysis of its methods,and many of its findings are appropriate across the Social Sciences. But in my view TA appears to have narrowed its vision, and maybe our two disciplines can fruitfully inform each other. I will begin with a brief history of Social Anthropology and its treatment of the sacred and spiritual. This gives something of an explanation as to how TA has developed in a particular way. I will offer an alternative model based on my Fieldwork: I have been studying the Transpersonal within mild altered states of consciousness (ASCs), both sacred and secular, as part of ordinary everyday ‘streams of consciousness’ (James, 1950), and therapeutic effects of such states.

They Broke the Mold: The Spirit of Creativity in Japanese Enterprise

Every society is an enigma. The Japanese have been characterized as the most enigmatic of all. They are variously described as hidden, unknowable, impenetrable, inscrutable; all words which accuse the Japanese of being a group apart. This is a moral, as well as a scientific judgement, made by the same western scholarship which has characterized other non-western peoples. After the war, when commentators assumed that Japan would never be anything more than a colony of the first world, no one dreamed that within 35 years, Japan would challenge the US yet again.

The illusions of encounter: Muslim ‘minds’ and Hindu revolutionaries in First World War Germany and after

German political Orientalists in the era of the First World War thought that new ethnographic methods and insights would allow them to coax Muslim populations throughout the Middle East and South Asia into violent revolt against the British. The European imperial mindset insisted that non-Western peoples could be mastered and masterminded at whim. In fact, German pursuit of absolute control of Asian populations led to their loss of control, as their misrecognitions of the facts on the ground placed them in relationships of mutually-affecting lived encounter with Indian revolutionaries. While these interactions remained largely limited to the realm of military operations during the war, they opened up into ideological encounters on the radical fringes of Weimar society in the war’s aftermath. Yet far from a study of humanistic exchange or understanding, this essay seeks to historicize the meetings of Germans and Indian émigrés and show how misrepresentations and power asymmetries were endemic to the encounter between these groups.

Periodizing Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space/Time Borders of Modernist Studies

Periodizing Modernism:Postcolonial Modernities and the Space/Time Borders of Modernist Studies Susan Stanford Friedman (bio) Periods are entities we love to hate. Yet we cannot do without them. . . . Consequently, the uses to which we put periods depend crucially on how we delimit them. . . . The art lies in the cutting. Marshall Brown1 Coloniality, in other words, is the hidden face of modernity and its very condition of possibility. Walter D. Mignolo2 . . . to announce the general end of modernity even as an epoch, much less as an attitude or an ethos, seems premature, if not patently ethnocentric, at a time when non-Western people everywhere begin to engage critically their own hybrid modernities. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar3 Einstein's theory of relativity forged a major paradigm shift in theorizing the relationship between time and space, one that systematized what some in the arts and philosophy of modernism were already beginning to articulate early in the century. More recently, cultural studies theorist Lawrence Grossberg has advocated what he calls "the timing of space and the spacing of time" as a precondition for a new "geography of beginnings."4 Regarding space and time not as absolutes but rather as cognitive [End Page 425] categories of human thinking, I want to build on these theories of relativity to examine the spatial politics of historical periodization—the way that generalizations about historical periods typically contain covert assumptions about space that privilege one location over others. Fredric Jameson's imperative—"Always historicize!"—leads unthinkingly into binaries of center/periphery unless it is supplemented with the countervailing imperative—Always spatialize!5 Jameson's widely influential essay, "Modernism and Imperialism," introduces the spatiality of global imperialism into his discussion of literary history and argues for imperialism as constitutive of modernist aesthetics in the West. But for him, modernism was over and done with by the end of World War II, to be followed by postmodernism characterized by a shift into the multinational corporate flows of late capitalism and new forms of imperialism.6 Many others, including Walter Mignolo as evident in the epigraph, would agree with Jameson's insistence that Western modernity is inextricably tied to Western colonialism in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. However, I consider Jameson's spatialization of modernism incomplete. A full spatialization of modernism changes the map, the canon, and the periodization of modernism dramatically. Moreover, rethinking the periodization of modernism requires abandoning what I have called the "nominal" definition of modernity, a noun-based designation that names modernity as a specific moment in history with a particular societal configuration that just happens to be the conditions that characterize Europe from about 1500 to the early twentieth century. The "relational" mode of definition, an adjectivally-based approach that regards modernity as a major rupture from what came before, opens up the possibility for polycentric modernities and modernisms at different points of time and in different locations.7 Examining the spatial politics of the conventional periodization of modernism fosters a move from singularities to pluralities of space and time, from exclusivist formulations of modernity and modernism to ones based in global linkages, and from nominal modes of definition to relational ones. The Spatial Politics of Periodizing Modernism Modernism is conventionally understood as a loose affiliation of aesthetic movements that unfolded in the first half of the twentieth century. This view is accurately reflected in the founding statement of the Modernist Studies Association, still listed on the website, although its parameters are considerably more limited than the wide-ranging work presented at the Modernist Studies Association annual conferences: The Modernist Studies Association is devoted to the study of the arts in their social, political, cultural, and intellectual contexts from the later nineteenth- through the mid-twentieth century. The organization aims to develop an international and interdisciplinary forum to promote exchange among scholars in this revitalized and rapidly changing field.8 There is a spatial politics embedded in the Modernist Studies Association's temporal borders for modernism, roughly the 1890s–1940s, one that picks up on the prevailing assumptions about temporality in the field more generally. Even within the European [End Page 426] context, this dating privileges Anglo-American modernism, that is, modernism in English...

Depression: epidemic or pseudo-epidemic?

Depression: epidemic or pseudo-epidemic?

Cultures as a Causative of Mental Disorder

A review of previous papers makes it evident that mental disorder is considered to be the product of multiple factors. The present paper is in harmony with this orientation, and its title, which was assigned to us, should not be interpreted as implying ideas of mono-causal relationship. The discussion of our topic will be necessarily limited and selective, since talking about culture in its global sense touches on virtually all aspects of human behavior. Some areas such as family relationships and social change have been discussed earlier. Others such as cultural history and philosophy are too vast to be treated adequately in one chapter. We shall attempt, therefore, to present some points from salient literature, and to give impressions derived from several years of research dealing with socio-cultural factors and mental disorder.

Resurrecting Dead White Males

Joseph J. Ellis. His Excellency: George Washington. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. xiv + 320 pp. Notes and index. $26.95 (cloth); $15.00 (paper). In the last several decades, two countervailing tendencies have become manifest in historical scholarship. The first, perhaps best described by Jill Lepore and Richard D. Brown as microhistory, concentrates on increasingly narrow topics.1 Practitioners of this approach spurn studies of elite white males in favor of more marginalized subjects—women, slaves, poor working-class individuals and groups (both female and male), Native Americans, and a wide range of obscure figures of various ethnic backgrounds and occupations. Even when they focus on particular individuals, these historians have "nonbiographical goals in mind . . . they are keen to evoke a period, a mentalite, a problem: the origins of religious beliefs, the power of popular culture, the clash of Western and non-Western people." In their minds, "the life story . . . is merely the means to an end—and that end is always explaining the culture."2 Illustrious examples of this approach include Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (1990), Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York (1998), and Irene Quenzler Brown and Richard D. Brown, The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler: A Story of Rape, Incest, and Justice in Early America (2003). While a great many historians, concentrating their efforts on microhistory or the closely related fields of social and cultural history, have published stunningly insightful books dealing with the early republic in recent years, their work pales in comparison to the popularity of authors providing studies of the Founding Fathers. These "dead white males," shunned by microhistorians have undergone a remarkable resurrection. During the last few years the reading public has made David McCullough's John Adams (2001) a runaway bestseller. In this same period Richard Brookhiser's Alexander Hamilton, American (1999), Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton (2004), Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003), and Joseph Ellis's American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (1996) have all enjoyed widespread popular [End Page 162] success. Others garnering considerable public attention include Gordon Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (2004), and Joseph Ellis, Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams (1993), and Founding Brothers: the Revolutionary Generation (2000). In addition, a growing number of studies devoted to George Washington have begun to appear. These include Richard Brookhiser, Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington (1996), James MacGregor Burns, George Washington (2004), David H. Fischer, Washington's Crossing (2004), and Henry Wiencek, An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America (2003). Now Joseph Ellis weighs in with his own study of Washington—"the deadest, whitest male in American history" (p. xi). Fully aware of the prodigious accomplishments of Douglas Southall Freeman's seven-volume George Washington: A Biography (1948–1957) and James Thomas Flexner's four-volume George Washington (1965–1972), Ellis claims that "we do not need another epic painting, but rather a fresh portrait focused tightly on Washington's character" (p. xiii). This is what he has written. His acknowledged model is Marcus Cunliffe's George Washington, Man and Monument (1958). There is, however, a much more recent work that approaches Benjamin Franklin in much the same way that Ellis treats George Washington. Edmund Morgan's Benjamin Franklin (2002) is a wonderfully tight character study of Franklin quite dissimilar to Walter Isaacson's larger tome. While certainly cognizant of the wisdom of Franklin—as well as the varied talents of Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and James Madison—Ellis maintains that even within such a pantheon of greats, Washington remained "primus inter pares, the Foundingest Father of them all" (p. xiv). In Ellis's mind the explanation for this ascendancy "lies buried within the folds of the most ambitious, determined, and potent personality of an age not lacking for worthy rivals" (p. xiv...

Africana Phenomenology

iven some of the exclusive claims on reason that the West has made, it has been difficult to see clearly the rationality of non-Western peoples. This eclipsing of the rationality of non-Western peoples, particularly people of African descent, has made problematic the status of theory in fields such as Africana Studies. Quite often, it is assumed that developments in this field will take the form of case studies that will help to confirm or disconfirm theories and methodologies produced by the West. In other words, nothing new of theoretical importance is expected to emerge from the growth of Africana Studies. Indeed even some Africana scholars have associated theory and rational linear thought with white males. This is certainly not how I see Africana Studies. My disagreement with this view is confirmed with every new development in the growing field of Africana philosophy. Here the theoretical side of Africana Studies becomes particularly evident, given the nature of philosophical practices. In this paper, I examine the case of Africana phenomenology, an emerging subfield within the larger discursive terrain of Africana philosophy. Like the larger terrain of which it is a part, Africana phenomenology is not very well known because it too has been forced to exist in the non-rational and a-theoretical shadow cast over it by Western philosophy in general, and Western phenomenology in particular. Thus our aim in this paper is twofold: the first is to bring the field of Africana phenomenology clearly into view by outlining its contours, problems and theorists. In particular, I will focus on the contributions of WEB Dubois, Frantz Fanon and Lewis Gordon. Second, I will explore the philosophical implications of the emergence of Africana phenomenology as a subfield of Africana philosophy. These I will argue point to a metaphysical distinctness that can only be adequately engaged by a more comparative approach to philosophy. G