Oxford University Press's Blog, page 216

Dynasties: chimpanzees and their community

Sir David Attenborough returns to our screens tonight narrating a new nature documentary: Dynasties. Over the course of five weeks, this series will follow individual animals – chimpanzees, emperor penguins, lions, painted wolves, and tigers – as they protect and lead their respective social units.

To accompany each episode, we will be publishing a blog post about each species featured in the show, focusing on their interactions with other members of their species. Tonight, we will be starting with one of our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, who we diverged from roughly six million years ago: chimpanzees.

Be sure to check the OUPblog over the next four weeks to catch the rest of this blog series!

The community that feeds together, stays together
Rather than sticking with a large group – or ‘community’ – at all times, chimpanzees have a fission-fusion group dynamic. Chimpanzees live within a large community and inhabit the same area, but they often roam solo, coming together into small parties at feeding sites or for social interaction, with individuals coming and going as they please.Partying with friends
Small parties within a community are often formed based on social bonds. For example, some males form alliances with each other, and dominant males can attract a posse; furthermore, chimpanzees tend to roam with their friends and close family, while mothers and babies always stick together.Image credit: Mother and child by PatternPictures. CC0 via Pixabay.Moving communities
While male chimpanzees remain with the community they were born into for life, females usually transfer to neighbouring communities when they reach adolescence, before they begin to reproduce. When they move, immigrant chimpanzees often face aggression from the resident females, and the immigrants become dependent on the resident males for protection and friendship as they settle into the new community.Male bonding
Male chimpanzees are more sociable than females, to the extent that they have a ‘male-bonded society’. Males form dominance relationships which can lead to dominance hierarchies – i.e. competition to be alpha male of the community. Despite some rivalry being apparent, males have friendly interactions with each other: male chimpanzees groom each other and reconcile after conflicts more often than females do.Image credit: Young chimps taking care of each other by Tambako The Jaguar. CC BY-ND 2.0 via Flickr.Roaming males
Male chimpanzees often patrol the boundaries of their territory to observe their neighbours and protect against threats. The size of a chimpanzee community’s territory grows as the number of males increases, and also as the males grow in strength because this means they are better equipped to fight their neighbours and prevent territory theft.When fighting gets lethal
Occasionally when neighbouring communities meet, a fight can break out between the opposing males. Male chimpanzees are known to kill rival chimpanzees, not just the opposing males but also infants and infertile adult females. In mammals, lethal aggression between groups of males is unusual, even more so in primates where the behaviour only occurs in chimpanzees and humans.Hierarchical females
Among females, those with top billing are better fed. Higher-ranking females spend less time foraging for food but still have a higher diet quality than subordinate females, who must spend more time seeking out food in a lower-quality habitat – i.e. somewhere with fewer, lower-quality food sources – to avoid associating with dominant females and ensure nutritional needs are met.Reproduction over nutrition
When fertile, female chimpanzees alter their feeding habits, favouring lower-quality habitats – where males can be found – than they are entitled to by hierarchical status. This suggests that females, rather than males, alter their movement patterns in order to mate, females being ultimately responsible for the continuation of the population.Paternity on trial
Chimpanzees don’t tend to have permanent (or even semi-permanent) mates. Instead, female chimpanzees copulate with multiple males within their community, in order to confuse paternity and reduce the likelihood of their offspring being killed by males. However, when females are ovulating, high-ranking males try to prevent them from mating with other males within the community, with some success: it has been found that high-ranking males have more offspring within their community than low-ranking males, and can even persuade a female to mate solely with him for a short period of time.

Featured image credit: Chimpanzees in Uganda by USAID Africa Bureau. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons .

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How disconnecting from digital pressures can boost learning

Students in France went back to school in 2018 sans smartphones, thanks to a nationwide detox law passed in June. Children under age 15 cannot use mobile phones in classes, during breaks, on playgrounds, or anywhere on the premises of French schools. The ban aims to help young people concentrate, improve learning outcomes, and encourage physical activity. The French education minister describes the legislation as giving students a “right to disconnect” from digital pressures during the school day and helping everyone to “reflect on our phone use in society, including adults.”

In the U.S., there seems to be an opposite trend, toward relaxing student phone bans. The number of public schools banning phones dropped from 90 percent in 2010 to 66 percent in 2016. A prominent example is New York City’s 2015 reversal of a decade-long ban on smartphones, which affected around a million students. The prohibition was lifted due to pressure from parents who wanted to be able to reach kids during the day—not from students demanding to use their devices at school. A group of parents sued the city for violating students’ supposed “right to possess cellphones” and parents’ “right to oversee their children’s safety.” In rescinding the ban, Mayor Bill de Blasio said the city law hindered “modern parenting.”

What about modern learning, though?

Discussions about bans tend to focus on the losses that people perceive: losing access to a device, to unrestrained mediated communication, to the illusion of safety. Parents are understandably anxious about children traveling to and from school alone—and about the possibility of school shootings or other emergencies. Mobile phones offer vague reassurance. Yet parents are also increasingly concerned about the amount of time their kids spend glued to screens, about their kids being cyber-bullied, and whether their kids are learning as much as they should.

It’s time to redirect this conversation. Instead of putting devices and their absence on center stage, let’s look squarely at the benefits that students enjoy when distraction machines get expelled. We know more now than we did a few years ago about the influence of mobile phones on young people, learning processes, and social life. Instead, we could think seriously about how to create “safe spaces for the mind,” where students can focus on class work, learn more, reduce stressors that inhibit education, and develop social skills for success in school, work and life.

While young people surely love digital devices and networks, many of them are worried about negative effects like distraction, addiction, bullying, rumor spreading, peer pressure, and lack of in-person contact.

There’s ample research documenting that cellphone use distracts from productive learning. Students lose focus in class due to their or classmates’ cellphones, that phone use is correlated with bullying and being bullied; and that digital communication creates stress for young people. Research also shows that student performance improves when these devices are banished and that spending time without devices makes kids more empathetic.

While young people surely love digital devices and networks, many of them are worried about negative effects like distraction, addiction, bullying, rumor spreading, peer pressure, and lack of in-person contact. Fifty-four percent of teens think they spend too much time on their phones, while a third say they lose focus in class because they’re checking their phones. (Also, fifty-one percent of teens say their parents are distracted by their phones when having in-person conversations.) Most teens have tried to reduce the time they spend using mobile devices. Phone interdictions at school could aid student self-development, in part by providing more independence from peers, parents, and technology alike.

If we do “reflect on our phone use in society” and make student success the top priority, we can summon the collective will to realize the benefits of smartphone constraints. This means overcoming some logistical obstacles. Many administrators dread the chore of keeping phones out of schools, such as by providing individual lockers or forbidding students to bring phones. There are other alternatives to the status quo. For example, more than 600 public schools across the country have started to use pouches that temporarily disable phones in certain areas of a building. The practice is becoming more widespread in hospitals, churches, concerts, and courtrooms. Similar experiments in systemic device constraints abound.

Phone ban proponents are sometimes characterized as Luddites, as “against technology.” Not so. Rather, this call to create safe spaces for the mind is Post-Luddite, in addressing the negative externalities of device use. It declares what we stand for: helping humans to better understand the world, to engage in dialogue, show empathy, think autonomously, and act creatively. These are some values driving the Slow Media movement, which nurtures collective visions for using media in sustainable ways.

In defending young people’s right to disconnect from digital pressures, adults might even recognize that they have one, too.

Featured image credit: Woman, using, typer and togetherness by rawpixel. Public Domain via Unsplash .

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The Mysterious Case of the Disappearing Existentialist

At the end of the second world war, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre launched the “existentialist offensive,” an ambitious campaign to shape a new cultural and political landscape. The word ‘existentialism’ was a popular neologism with no clear meaning. They wanted to profit from its media currency by making their philosophy its definition.

Sartre’s talk “Existentialism is a Humanism” was an instant legend. The venue was packed, the crowd spilling into the street. Furniture got broken. People fainted and were carried outside. Sartre had to push his way through to the podium, where he delivered a speech entirely off the cuff. Unsurprisingly, in the circumstances, it was rather sketchy and occasionally inconsistent.

Beauvoir’s altogether more coherent account was published a few weeks later as “Existentialism and Popular Wisdom” in the third issue of Les Temps Modernes, the cultural and political journal the pair had founded.
These were the keynotes of their rich programme of talks, articles, plays, and novels, which firmly established the fifth and sixth arrondisements of Paris as the centre of European intellectual innovation.

An extensive secondary literature about existentialism soon sprang up. Books about existentialist fiction focused on Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre, sometimes adding Samuel Beckett or Herman Hesse.

Books about existentialist philosophy focused on Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre, with some including Karl Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel.

And thus, as if by magic, one of the two original existentialists had disappeared from view. Sartre’s writings had made it into both parts of this newly created canon, but Beauvoir’s were in neither. Why did this happen? What exactly is the difference between her and the men whose works were identified as paradigmatic of existentialism?

This really is quite mysterious. Most of those included did not describe themselves as existentialists. Pretty much all of them either died before the word was coined or explicitly denied that it was a fair description of their work.

Indeed, the only one of these men to explicitly label their own work as existentialism was Sartre, who did so alongside Beauvoir, both defining the term by their shared philosophy. This awkward fact was ignored in the burgeoning secondary literature, often with the dubious thought that a true existentialist might reject the label anyway.

The equally awkward fact that the thinkers and works newly classified as existentialist hold nothing at all in common was also ruled unimportant in the secondary literature, usually by the simple expedient of declaring existentialism a “family resemblance” category.

  This debate about Beauvoir’s relation to existentialism has been entirely generated by trying to understand existentialism without reference to her philosophy in the first place. 

Exactly how is Beauvoir supposed to be related to this family? She has been read as a descendant who merely dramatised and drew ethical implications from Sartre’s philosophy. Conversely, she has been read as an unacknowledged ancestor of Sartre’s existentialism.

And she has been read as outside the family entirely, due to the deep disagreements between her conception of human agency and Sartre’s. Her writings of the existentialist offensive, on this reading, were simply designed to promote his career.

This debate about Beauvoir’s relation to existentialism has been entirely generated by trying to understand existentialism without reference to her philosophy in the first place. If we try now to add her to the established canon of existentialist writers, we can only caricature her by emphasising too strongly the features she shares with members of that canon.

For her philosophy at the time of the existentialist offensive was built around two distinctive features not shared with them.

One of these is her theory of sedimentation. Beauvoir argued that our values and outlook become gradually more embedded in our cognition the longer we endorse them, making it difficult to fully reject them later. This directly contradicts Sartre’s view, often considered crucial to existentialism, that we have the ‘radical freedom’ to simply abandon any of our values or ideas.

The other is her argument that it is morally imperative to respect and promote human autonomy. Existentialism is often thought to reject any idea of an objectively binding or universal morality, yet Beauvoir’s most recent book at the time of the existentialist offensive, Pyrrhus et Cinéas, was an extended argument for exactly this.

To make the disappearing existentialist herself reappear, we need to rethink existentialism. We need to return to the works of the existentialist offensive and the texts they summarise, treat the shared philosophy of those texts as definitive of existentialism, and treat their disagreements as theoretical disputes within existentialism.

We should then categorise other writers as existentialist only to extent that they agree with this core definition, allowing their works to expand on these definitive texts and contribute to resolving the disagreements between them.

This will not only set the historical record straight. It will also set the philosophical record playing at the right speed, allowing us at last to hear it properly.

Featured Image: “Jean Paul Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir welcomed” by Avraham Shlonsky and Leah Goldberg at Lod airport. Image courtesy of Israel Government Press Office. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Place of the Year 2018 nominee spotlight: North Korea

North Korea dominated the headlines in 2018 with historic meetings and heightened tensions over nuclear threats. This year Kim Jong-Un, Chairman of the Workers’ Party of Korea and Supreme Leader of North Korea, has met with multiple world leaders, and has been vocal about his stance on the North Korean nuclear program. This has ignited strong reactions, ranging from hope, confusion, and fear around the world.

Kim Jong-Un met with Moon Jae-In, the President of South Korea, in April for an inter-Korean summit. The countries reached a historic agreement to work toward peace and reunification following decades of conflict. North Korea promised to retire its nuclear program, and both countries signed an agreement pledging to work towards the “common goal” of denuclearization on the peninsula. In late October, along with the United Nations Command, North and South Korea agreed to remove firearms and guard posts from a portion of the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between the two countries.

While the two countries are still technically at war, the visible thaw in relations began in February at the 2018 Olympic Winter Games. Athletes from North and South Korea marched under a unified flag at the opening ceremony PyeongChang, and the women’s ice hockey team featured women from both countries competing together. Following inter-Korean sport talks on November 2, North and South Korea issued a statement announcing that they wish to compete as a unified team at the Tokyo Olympics in 2020, and intend on bidding to co-host the 2032 Summer Games.

Despite initial plans for Kim Jong-Un to visit Seoul, Moon Jae-In told parliamentary leaders that the trip may be delayed until early next year. This highly anticipated event would be historic, as it would be the first time a North Korean head of state ventured to the South. Even as the trip has been postponed, however, both countries have agreed that further demilitarization should continue, as should reunions between families separated for decades on either side of the border.

North Korea has also been meeting with leaders of other nations in a bid to join the global community. Kim Jong-Un met with Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel in early November in Pyongyang. According to North Korea’s state media, they agreed to expand and strengthen their strategic relations. They discussed ways to boost ties between their countries in fields such as the economy, culture, public health, science, and technology. The state media stressed their shared socialist history and commitment to continued solidarity. Both are hoping to get out from under US economic sanctions.

Prior to that meeting, Kim Jong-Un met with US President Donald Trump for the first time in Singapore in June, resulting in President Trump declaring that Kim, “trusts me, and I trust him.” Leading up to high-level talks between Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his North Korean counterpart Kim Yong Chol in early November, North Korea’s Foreign Ministry warned that if the United States did not ease the sanctions on North Korea, Pyongyang could restart “building up nuclear forces.” The day before the discussions were scheduled, the State Department announced that they would be delayed. They did not give a specific reason for the decision, but tensions between the two countries have continued to rise. The negotiations are currently at a stalemate, as the United States is only willing to form a peaceful relationship with North Korea until after it gives up its nuclear weapons, and North Korea is only willing to give up its nuclear weapons once it has established a peaceful and trusting relationship with the United States.

Rhetoric centered upon the threat of nuclear weapon usage has instilled unease around the world. A missile test alert in Hawaii resulted in widespread panic fueled by the tension between North Korea and the United States. Just days later, a Japanese public broadcaster NHK mistakenly sent out an alert warning that North Korea had fired a missile; this was quickly corrected.

This year North Korea has made history. Kim Jong-Un continues to work to end his country’s years of isolation through meetings with high ranking officials and leaders around the world. As conversations continue between the United States and North Korea, only time can tell what progress will be made in regard to denuclearization.

Learn more about nuclear power on the global scale with Armageddon and Paranoia: The Nuclear Confrontation since 1945 and Nuclear Power: A Very Short Introduction.

Place of the Year 2018 Shortlist

Featured image credit: “north-korea-pyongyang-bronze” by Alex_Berlin. CC0 via Pixabay.

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Promoting digital technologies for disease prevention among Latinos

Half of Americans live with at least one chronic disease, such as diabetes, hypertension, or heart disease. Chronic diseases take an economic toll and account for a large proportion of health care costs.  A moderate amount of weight loss and an increase in physical activity can prevent or reduce the burden of chronic disease.  Therefore, we need to find a low-cost platform that is effective for chronic illness prevention. The use of digital technology, such as smartphones and mobile apps, has great potential to increase both adaptation and impact while decreasing cost.

As the U.S. population is becoming more diverse, a “one size fits all” prevention program may not work for everyone. For example, Latinos are expected to make up 24% of the total U.S. population by 2065, up from 3.5% in 1960. Smartphone ownership among Latino Americans is extremely high when compared with other races/ethnicities in the United States. The Spanish-speaking population in the U.S. makes up the largest percentage of smartphone owners, who use their smartphones as their primary source of Internet and communication. Despite the rise in smartphone ownership and usage among Latino Americans, a limited number of studies have looked at the use of smartphone applications within the context of weight loss via reducing caloric intake and increasing physical activity among overweight Latino Americans at risk for type 2 diabetes.

Our research team designed a study involving an in-person weight loss program in conjunction with commercially available inexpensive activity trackers and free apps for 54 Latino Americans. Although it was a small study conducted in the Bay Area of California, participants lost an average of 3.3% of their body weight and increased their activity to an additional 2000 steps (≈ one mile or 20 minutes brisk walking) per day from baseline over the 8-week study period.  In addition to these improvements, researchers observed clinically significant reductions in blood pressure. Lower blood pressure is associated with a reduction in stroke mortality and a reduction in mortality from vascular causes in middle-aged populations. Although our study findings are promising, we do not know how long these participants will maintain their weight loss and activity level, or whether they will continue using the app and activity tracker after the study.

In general, downloading a health app or wearing an activity tracker alone does not often lead to sustainable lifestyle changes. In fact, most people will stop using a downloaded app or wearing a tracker within a relatively short time period, and some people never even open these apps after downloading. Thus, the current challenges are how to use these digital technologies efficiently and effectively in a large population in a cost-effective manner. Rapid advances in technology, in particular artificial intelligence approaches, are creating new opportunities for prevention programs.

Featured image credit: Silver Iphone 6 Near Blue and Silver Stethoscope by Negative Space. CC0 via Pexels.

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The 1950s is a vanished world, but have we made social progress?

Britain has seen huge social changes over the course of my lifetime. The world of the 1950s, when I grew up in a modest suburb of Liverpool, has vanished forever. The material standard of living we enjoyed then would nowadays seem to be distinctly substandard. We didn’t have a family car; I shared a bedroom with my older brother; and there was no television set, though we did have a telephone – a rather unfamiliar contraption which we were all too scared to use. There never seemed to be quite enough to eat and we were all rather skinny. There was no problem of obesity in our family, but we didn’t grow particularly tall. Today’s younger generation tower over us.

However, we did go to church every Sunday (reluctantly it must be admitted) and belonged to the Boy Scouts (less reluctantly). And this was the era of the tripartite system – grammar schools, technical schools, and the secondary moderns. We never met anyone from one of the other types of school. We never really met anyone who wasn’t white, British, Protestant, and lower middle class. We were very proud to be British. We were thrilled when it was an Englishman, Roger Bannister, who beat the Australians and the Swedes to run the first four-minute mile.

It is a vanished world – and not one to which I personally look back with any great nostalgia. I think my grandchildren have a much nicer time growing up today. But many people do seem to look back on the 1950s as a golden age of stability and national cohesion, and perhaps it was an age which did have some strength that we have now lost.

In 1942 (which happens to be the year I was born), William Beveridge published his report in which he wrote: “Social insurance…fully developed may provide income security. It is an attack upon Want. But Want is only one of five giants on the road of reconstruction and in some ways the easiest to attack. The others are Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness.” Modern forms of Beveridge’s five giants remain high on the list of government priorities – in 2015 none of the main party manifestos missed out economic growth, improved education, an effective health service, reduced levels of unemployment, and more home building to meet the housing shortage.

Have we been running fast but not moving forward, as if on a treadmill in the gym?

We should always be a bit sceptical of commentators when they allege that things are not what they were. Your scepticism should certainly be extended to my own personal impressions of how pride in Britain has declined since I was growing up. One of my favourite sayings (attributed to the American statistician and management consultant J. Edwards Deming) is “In God we trust, all others must bring data.” In my new book, Social Progress in Britain, we have attempted to bring data to bear on measuring progress in Britain over the last half century (though the data are often woefully lacking).

In many ways the data confirmed my expectations. There are the changes that most people would consider to be a force for good: for example, in the decades since the post-war years we have got richer, and not just those at the top, those at the bottom have got modestly richer too. We live longer and infant mortality rates are massively improved. We’re more educated, at least in terms of the numbers of young people leaving school with qualifications and going to university.

And then there are the areas in which progress has stalled or where new issues have arisen: housing is one such area. We haven’t made much progress here in recent decades, and the parallel crises of homelessness and housing unaffordability are unlikely to be easily solved. But there were also surprises in our findings: I had fully expected British pride and other aspects of social cohesion to be in decline, but this does not appear to be the case. It was surprising to learn that, in terms of differences in outlook between different sectors of society, we were a divided nation already back in the 1950s.

We also needed to ask whether the trend towards increasing economic inequality is paralleled in the other domains of life. The evidence on balance indicates that, in the twenty-first century, life has been getting worse not better for some groups. The evidence is not as robust as one would wish, but we need to take very seriously the likelihood that poverty and food insecurity, overcrowding and homelessness, obesity, and youth unemployment have been deteriorating, and will continue to deteriorate.

This blog post is derived from excerpts from Anthony Heath’s new book Social Progress in Britain, which was released on the 27th September 2018. The book can be ordered here.

Feature image credit: Radio by Skitterphoto. CC0 licence via Pixabay

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Ypres: the city of ghosts

Visiting Ypres, or Ieper to use its modern name, is an amazing experience. First, there is the sheer wonder of wandering around a seemingly historic city that, on closer inspection, proves to be of very recent completion. Then, there is the impressive scale of the massive Cloth Hall, the great medieval trading market that attracted merchants from across Europe. But, that too proves to be a bit of curiosity when stared at, as the mix of very smooth, sharply cut stone merges with the pock-marked, scarred and worn pillars along the ground floor. Next to the Cloth Hall is a soaring medieval cathedral, but enter inside and it feels so new you almost expect it to squeak as it comes out of the shrink-wrap. Finally, there is the Menin Gate, a huge memorial to the British and Commonwealth missing of the Ypres salient. Tucked into the ramparts, the Menin Gate almost leaps out on the visitor walking along the street from the central square (the Grote Markt). It is the Menin Gate that provides the key to the rest of the mystery, for it commemorates the fact that this charming West Flanders city witnessed some of the most intense and prolonged fighting on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918. During that fighting Ypres was reduced to rubble and ashes only to rise again in replica form.

Battlefield tourism (or “pilgrimage,” as it was called during the inter-war period) has been at the heart of this process of bringing the war home since 1918. For the British the city was a site of pilgrimage, as summed up in the title of an early guidebook, Ypres: Holy Ground of British Arms. The British came to see ground made sacred by the bloody sacrifice of countless soldiers from the British Empire. Running alongside this reverential mode was standard tourism, as British people sought to buy souvenirs from the city and have home comforts. By the mid-twenties Ypres’ businesses were appealing directly to the British. “If you want a cup of good strong English tea have at the Tea Room”, was one café’s advertisement.

What another guidebook, the Baedeker, noted in 1930 still holds true today, namely that Ypres had “acquired a certain English air.” Today’s visitor, walking the streets of the “medieval” town, attending the daily remembrance ceremony at the Menin Gate or visiting a war cemetery on the outskirts of the city, is unlikely to bump into a German battlefield tourist; even at the German war cemetery at Langemarck (some six miles northeast of the city) anglophone visitors greatly outnumber their German counterparts. This was not always the case. Langemarck had once occupied a special place in the German memory of the Great War. It was the site where war volunteers had allegedly marched into death singing “Deutschland über alles” in November 1914. The memory of their noble “self-sacrifice” became a rallying cry for the political right during the 1920s and 1930s. When the Wehrmacht overrun Belgium in May 1940, this was celebrated as “Second Langemarck.” After 1945, following a hiatus of several years, German veterans of the First World War returned to the city for the 50th anniversary celebrations, often at the invitation of the city keen to foster a spirit of reconciliation. With the passing away of the veterans during the 1970s, the presence of German visitors in and around Ypres declined dramatically – precisely at the moment when British battlefield tourism started to increase again. Most German veterans went to their graves with their war stories, and only a few families toured the battlefields in the hope of recapturing something of the war experiences of their grandfathers. Flanders – the mere mention of the name could still send shock waves through the generation of survivors in the 1950s – faded from German collective memory and largely disappeared from tourist itineraries. The new generation no longer felt a deep emotional connection to the war dead and the landscape of the Ypres salient.

Today’s Ieper still has thousands of British visitors, with tourism as important to the economy of the city as it was in the twenties. But, in addition to the British, the Australians, Canadians, and New Zealanders are now coming in even greater numbers, as well as people from many other nations fascinated and intrigued by meeting the last great eyewitness left of the Great War: the landscape. Modern Ieper is a world forged and shaped in the furnace of a conflict that ended one hundred years ago this November.

Featured image credit: Menin Gate in Ypres, Belgium, in 2009 by Mikefield. CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Attacking a loaf of bread

Since loaf, from hlaif-, appears to be a more ancient word for “bread” (as noted in the posts for October 17 and October 24), people must have coined bread, to designate the product that was different from the old one. Below, I’ll risk promoting an old etymology of loaf, even though at present it does not seem to have any supporters. In the posts, referred to above, I mentioned a Slavic word sounding very much like loaf (Russian khleb “bread” and so forth). The opinion that khleb was borrowed from Germanic seems to be well-founded, but there is a detail never mentioned in the more recent works.

Next to khleb, Russian has the verb khlebat’ “to slurp, guzzle” (stress on the second syllable). The most authoritative etymological dictionary of Russian by Max Vasmer does not connect them and calls khlebat’ a sound-imitative word, which it probably is. The same, much more certainly, holds for Dutch slurpen ~ slorpen, the source of Engl. slurp. But some older scholars believed that khleb and khlebat’ are related, and they might be right. An excellent recent book on the development of Russian etymology since Vasmer’s days skips khleb or khlebat’, and I conclude that no post-Vasmer works deal with those words.

It does not seem to have occurred to anyone that khleb itself might be a word of at least partly onomatopoeic origin. Russian khliobovo (io = Russian ë; stress on o) denotes “liquid food” and is obviously derived from khlebat’ (a more “Standard” name for this kind of food is po-khliob-ka). It sometimes happens that borrowed words retain the senses lost in the original language. When modern etymologists compare the early history of loaf and bread, they tend to base their hypotheses on the opposition “unleavened food” versus “the food raised with yeast.” Those who connect bread and brew say “the food brewed with yeast.” From the historical point of view, the development was certainly from unleavened to leavened bread, but this is a general proposition. As we will see, in our case, one fact even militates against this reconstruction.

A meatloaf. What a misnomer (unless LOAF means “food”!). Image credit: MeatloafWithSauce by Renee Comet. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Another circumstance of some significance is the extremely general meaning of bread: daily bread, not by bread alone, and the like. Bread has taken over the original senses of hlaif-, and it looks, as though at one time, hlaif- meant “food in general.” Is it not possible that in the remote past hlaif– referred to some “generic” food that could be more or less “slurped,” while bread designated something more solid? To put it differently, could hlaif– be a kind of thick broth, with brauð– meaning what we today associate with bread?

There is another approach to loaf. Gothic preserved the verb hleib-jan “to take care of someone; help; strengthen.” The Gothic Bible was translated in the fourth century from Greek, and the Gothic form hleib-ida rendered Greek anti-lámbetō, the middle voice of anti-lambánō. The Greek verb had many senses. The relevant line occurs in Luke 1: 54 and sounds in the Authorized Version so: “He hath holpen his servant Israel.” The same Greek verb occurs in 1 Timothy 6: 2, where the Authorized Version has partakers. Since hleibjan turned up only once in the extant text of the Gothic Bible, we cannot know its full range of meanings, but its cognates elsewhere in Germanic mean “to protect.”   The root hleib– is such a perfect match for hlaif– (by ablaut) that their possible, even probable, connection has often been suggested. And here I should return to the circumstance complicating the yeast theory. Old English had the verb hlīfian “to rise high, tower.” It has been connected with hlaif-, the implication being that the product containing yeast rises. But it is not “loaf” but bread that is supposed to have been made with yeast!

Then there is Old Irish clíab “basket,” a possible cognate of loaf, and it too enters into the picture. We read in an old essay: “The custom still exists among the German peasantry of kneading bread in a shield-shaped basket.” The unexpected reference to the shield has its inspiration in Old Icelandic hlíf-skjöldr “protecting shield,” which has been interpreted as perhaps meaning “woven shield” (some kind of protective shirt). The shirt idea is pure fancy, but the connection between bread and a basket is curious. Let us continue the quotation (the article by Clarence Paschall appeared in 1909): “The basket is removed after the bread is placed in the oven, and the baked loaf presents an exact mold of the interior…. The American Indian who mixes a thick gruel of grain or acorns with water and boils it in a basket by inserting heated stones probably furnishes us with a good illustration of how our primitive Aryan ancestors prepared their bread.”

Etymology is at its strongest when it applies Occam’s razor and avoids making superfluous moves. The probable connection between Old Irish clíab and Germanic hlaif– hardly has anything to do with the ancient technology of bread making. A basket is a container used to cover or wrap up (“protect”) the object inside it. The link to bread being baked in baskets seems to be far-fetched; I can also add that in many languages the origin of the words for “basket” is irritatingly obscure. Much more convincing is the idea, developed long ago by Dutch etymologists. Hlaif-, rather than bread, as they pointed out, designated the product that sustained, nourished people. Gothic hleibjan and its Icelandic cognate meant “to protect,” and the distance between “protect” and “sustain” is short. The idea of hlaif– “a means of sustenance” tallies extremely well with the notion of Russian and Slavic khleb having once meant “food in general.”

Pancakes or bread in the making. Image credit: The Pancake Bakery by Pieter Aertsen. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

If my idea that the most ancient bread (called hlaif-) was not solid and resembled thick broth (or perhaps some sort of polenta?) has any merit, then that product had nothing to do with yeast or its absence. In the earlier posts, I mentioned the Latin word lībum “cake, pancake” and German Lebkuchen “gingerbread.” I’ll let Lebkuchen in limbo, for there are some difficulties with its history, but, if lībum is connected with Greek leibō and Latin lībo “I pour,” then again we encounter a liquid in the production of the most ancient bread. After all, pancakes are prepared from batter, which one pours onto a hot saucepan, and, as far as we know, pancakes were the earliest and the most widespread cereal product eaten in the prehistoric past. Not all the words mentioned above belong together, but, from whichever angle we approach the origin of loaf, we seem to encounter liquids. This connection might have given rise to the association between hlaif– and onomatopoeic words like slurp. Later, solid bread was invented.

By way of conclusion, I’ll return to monomaniacs. The distinguished modern etymologist Jost Trier is the author of many excellent works and certainly does not belong with Charles Mackay and others like him, but he attempted to derive multiple words from the idea of the ancient fence that separated one community from another. I think he went too far. Thus, he suggested that the root of hlaif– meant “to bend, lean” and explained it as designating “moistened clay used in wattling.” Two excellent dictionaries cite Trier’s explanation: one without comment, the other approvingly. In my opinion, this is another basket case.

Producing a loaf? Image credit: Ramses III bakery. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Fortified with so much liquid food, we are now ready to attack a loaf of modern bread. Next week I’ll bring this series of essays to a close.

Featured image credit: Wheat field by Polina Rytova. Public Domain via Unsplash.

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Place of the Year 2018 Shortlist: vote for your pick

Oxford’s Place of the Year campaign pulls together the most significant places and events of the year. The 2018 shortlist of nominees brings to light impactful moments in global history, influencing the environment, international relations, humanitarian crises, and space exploration. Explore each of our locations and vote for who think should be recognized as Oxford’s Place of the Year 2018!

“torre-latino-mexico-city-mexico” by Tilde Studio. CC0 via Pixabay.

MEXICO

Mexico endured multiple natural disasters in 2018. One earthquake hit Mexico City right after the Mexican national soccer team defeated Germany in the World Cup, leading to initial speculation that the quake had been caused by jubilant fans. This was proven untrue shortly after, however—it was in fact an entirely natural earthquake. On the Pacific coast of Mexico, it has been a difficult hurricane season. This week, Tropical Storm Xavier became the 22nd named tropical storm of the 2018 eastern Pacific hurricane season, making this year’s hurricane season the most active since 1992.

In economic news, Mexico, the United States, and Canada agreed on a revised trade deal to replace NAFTA in early October, called USMCA. It is expected to be signed by end of November, and then will be sent to Congress for approval. Despite the cooperation, however, tensions remain high as immigration remains a talking point in both countries. As a caravan of migrants from Central America makes their way through Mexico toward the US, President Trump has deployed troops to the US-Mexico border to keep the migrants out.

“wave-water-sea-ocean-pacific” by RogerMosley. CC0 via Pixabay

PACIFIC OCEAN

A study in March revealed that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP), the world’s largest collection of ocean garbage, has grown to more than 600,000 square miles. That is twice the size of Texas, or three times the size of France. The mass weighs 88,000 tons, a number which is 16 times higher than previous estimations indicated. The trash in the patch originates from around the Pacific Rim, including nations in Asia and North and South America.

The GPGP is devastating for marine life. The plastic has deteriorated into microplastics as a result of sun exposure, waves, marine life, and temperature changes. Once they reach this small size, microplastics are difficult to remove. They are often mistaken for food by marine animals, resulting in malnutrition and serious threats to the animals’ behavior, health, and existence.

There are serious consequences for human beings and our economy as a result of the GPGP. Through a process called bioaccumulation, chemicals found in plastics will enter the body of the animal that feeds on it, which will consequently be passed to humans as they eat the animal. According to the United Nations, the approximate environmental damage caused by plastic to marine ecosystems represents $13 billion.

“iss-space-station” by WikiImages. CC0 via Pixabay

INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION

At the end of August, a tiny hole was found in the International Space Station (ISS), leading to a small drop in cabin pressure. Initially thought to be the result of a micrometeoroid strike, Russian cosmonauts came to the shocking conclusion that it may have been deliberately drilled, leading to suggestions of sabotage. The investigation into this incident is ongoing. One investigation that is closed, however, is the one into the failed launch of a Soyuz spacecraft in October. The Russian agency Roscosmos explained that their investigation pointed the blame to a bent pin, which prevented one of the side boosters from cleanly falling away. This resulted in its decompression, and the loss of control over the rocket.

All this is happening in the shadow of President Trump’s proposal in June to create a new branch of the US military called the United States Space Force. He explained that, “We must have American dominance in space.” How this could affect the spirit of cooperation on ISS is unknown.

“myanmar-burma-landscape-sunrise” by 12019 / 10266 images. CC0 via PixabayMYANMAR (BURMA)

Extreme violence and discrimination has led to a humanitarian crisis in Myanmar’s Rakhine State. Throughout 2017 and 2018, Rohingya refugees have been crossing the border into Bangladesh in fear of their lives. United Nations officials have described the crisis as “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.” Mid-October reports have revealed that the number of Rohingya refugees has reached nearly one million, with young girls in Bangladesh refugee camps sold into forced labor accounting for the largest group of trafficking victims.

Myanmar military personnel conducted a systemic campaign through false Facebook accounts and posts, targeting the country’s predominantly Muslim Rohingya minority group. The posts consisted of personnel posing as pop stars and national heroes, one claiming Islam was a global threat to Buddhism, and another sharing a fictitious story about the rape of a Buddhist woman by a Muslim man. Human rights groups blame this anti-Rohingya propaganda for inciting murders, rapes, and the largest forced human migration in recent history.

“north-korea-pyongyang-bronze” by Alex_Berlin. CC0 via Pixabay

NORTH KOREA

In April, Kim Jong Un, Chairman of the Workers’ Party of Korea and Supreme Leader of North Korea, met with Moon Jae-In, President of South Korea, for an inter-Korean summit. The countries reached a historic agreement to work toward peace and reunification following decades of conflict. North Korea promised to retire its nuclear program, and both countries signed an agreement pledging to work towards the “common goal” of denuclearization on the peninsula. In late October, along with the United Nations Command, North and South Korea agreed to remove firearms and guard posts from a portion of the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between the two countries.

In June, Kim Jong Un met with US President Donald Trump for the first time in Singapore, resulting in President Trump declaring that Kim, “trusts me, and I trust him.” Leading up to high-level talks between Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his North Korean counterpart Kim Yong Chol in early November, North Korea’s Foreign Ministry warned that if the United States did not ease the sanctions on North Korea, Pyongyang could restart “building up nuclear forces.” The negotiations are at a stalemate, as the United States is only willing to form a peaceful relationship with North Korea until after it gives up its nuclear weapons, and North Korea is only willing to give up its nuclear weapons once it has established a peaceful and trusting relationship with the United States.

Place of the Year 2018 Shortlist

Featured image credit: “globes-spheres-maps-ball-world” by Free-Photos. CC0 via Pixabay.

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Facing the challenges of serving the public as an academic

What does it mean to be an academic? To be an academic working in environmental law? One part of our multi-faceted role is what I am calling “public service”—trying to make our small portion of the world a slightly better place. Public service is difficult. Its demands, however, are rather similar to those we face in our broader academic life.

We serve the public throughout our job description, whether pursuing knowledge for its own sake, or helping others learn to think deeply and critically. But I am concerned with efforts to use academic knowledge and expertise to do good beyond the university. I have been reflecting on my experiences in post-Brexit environmental governance (working with NGOs, appearing before Select Committees, talking to civil servants and other participants in this debate). The sheer emotional and intellectual labour of public service should not be underestimated.

We face four striking challenges when we move beyond the university. First, we must largely expect to do this work without credit. Not because other people are cheating us of our just desserts (although that happens), but because public service is genuinely collaborative. Our contribution as academics is small, inseparable from the expertise of other individuals and groups, and from their relationships with other allies and antagonists. And our contributions are tied to our broad disciplinary expertise and our life experience, our ability to form relationships and to build trust—not necessarily to specific publications.

Taking credit matters in academic life, not for its own sake, but because we are expected constantly to perform our achievements for measurement (for Research Excellence Frameworks and Teaching Excellence Frameworks, for promotion). Collaborative public service fits uncomfortably into this culture.

Second, working with unfamiliar audiences demands fresh skills, and can challenge the ways we understand our own expertise. I have been fortunate to work with some talented and generous people, and building trust among a community is the same anywhere. But we are outsiders, and we may face difficult moments.

Third, we need to find a way to continue to be truthful to our own expertise. There is often a tension between rendering our expertise accessible, and insisting on the legitimacy of its complexity, a tension between influence and (if not truth) perhaps an acceptable form of completeness. Similarly, where do we place the limits of our expertise? When do I speak as an expert, when do I speak as a lay person? We might push our expertise out of an instinct to be useful, out of ego, or because we are fully politically committed to an issue. 

And fourth, we necessarily enter the broader debate about the relationship between scholarship and advocacy or activism. Maintaining a clear divide between our research or scholarship and advocacy might seem to be the provisional answer to the dilemma—but such clear divides are rarely sustainable, and environmental lawyers more than anyone understand that placing our “selves” in our scholarship is inevitable.

These challenges are genuinely difficult, and are especially visible in public service. But importantly, they demand the same sort of intellectual integrity as our broader academic lives. Whether teaching, researching, or working beyond the university, we have the same obligation to work with fairness and honesty. In all parts of our work, we should strive to be even-handed, open-minded and self-critical, even as we recognise the elusiveness of objective expertise. And most of our work involves somewhat public commitments, with the same risk of being overly committed to earlier claims as in public service. Being able to change our minds, and to be wrong with some grace, is an important academic quality—elusive, and hard to pull off, but important. 

Time is short, and we need be conscious of where we put our energies. So why do public service? Why undertake this challenging work, which doesn’t fit neatly into established categories of institutional reward? Most obviously, because we have something to offer. Legal scholars are able to subject sets of related issues to sustained focus, without having constantly to respond to the latest crisis, the latest legal development or the latest demand from a client. This persistence gives us, at our best and not uniquely, a depth of analysis that is set firmly within an understanding of the broader institutional context. We should also bring a level of independence to the table. Even if we recognise that academic work cannot be entirely above the political fray, being able to speak only for ourselves, rather than for a group or constituency, is an enormous privilege. 

More personally, working outside the university can be rewarding and enjoyable, learning from new experiences and talented new people. With luck, we have the satisfaction of a job well done. But a moral imperative of service is probably the ultimate driver. This is not to say that we should all be desperately engaging all of the time; public service might be what Richard Watermeyer calls a “workload extravagance.” We can only afford a workload extravagance at particular stages of our lives and careers, with the right sort of institutional support, and for things we care about very much. 

Sustained public service is difficult, but it is also potentially rewarding. Importantly, it is not so different from all of the other parts of our academic life, demanding basic qualities of scholarly integrity. 

Featured image credit: Books-students-library-university by Pexels via Pixabay.

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