Oxford University Press's Blog, page 485

How long was my century?

In 2002 I faced a dilemma relating to an editorial project that perhaps only another historian can appreciate. Scrambling to complete the Introduction to Twentieth-Century China: New Approaches, I had to figure out how long to say the eponymous period had lasted. I didn’t tell my students, members of my family, or any of my non-historian friends about my struggle with the question of the length of China’s twentieth century, as I knew if I did, most of them would have chuckled. “Jeff,” I imagined them saying, “math has never been your strong suit, but even you should be aware that the crucial thing about centuries is that, by definition, they are one hundred years long.”

Had I mentioned my dilemma to other card-carrying members of my peculiar tribe, Homo Historicus, though, they would have been more likely to nod their heads than raise their eyebrows or laugh. Specialists in British history routinely refer to a ‘Long Eighteenth Century’, framed in political terms by the events of 1688 at one end and the Napoleonic Wars in the 19th century at the other. And in The Age of Extremes, Eric Hobsbawm makes a strong case for the idea that the world had a ‘Short Twentieth Century’, bracketed by the Russian Revolution of 1917, which led to the establishment of the Soviet Union, and the cluster of upheavals that culminated in 1991 with that country’s implosion.

At first I found the notion of China having had a Short Twentieth Century appealing, due to a fascination with the centrality of the idea of Geming. This term, made up of two characters, can be literally translated as “stripping the mandate” (as in mandate to rule), but from the very early 1900s on has been treated as the standard equivalent for the word “revolutions” (in the plural, lower case) and also for “The Revolution” (decidedly singular and upper case). Many political theorists and actors have invested this compound with a special power and focusing on this term made a short twentieth century seem logical.

Dr. Sun Yat-sen in 1924 in Canton by unknown. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

A Chinese twentieth century organized around revolutionary organizations, figures, and visions could be said to have begun in the second decade of the 1900s, with the mutinies and uprisings that led to the fall of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). In the wake of these insurrections, Sun Yat-sen took power on January 1, 1912, as China’s First President and the first Chinese head of state who was a self-proclaimed revolutionary. From that point on, nearly every top Chinese leader and contender for power, from the Nationalist Party head Chiang Kai-shek up to Mao Zedong would base his legitimacy on the idea that he was carrying forward the holy mission of the country’s Geming. Popular challenges to them, meanwhile, would be cast up to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, not as efforts to abandon or reject the revolutionary project but rather to get it back on track, to place it in the hands of leaders with a better claim to speak in its name.

Since the 4th June Massacre brought 1989’s mass movement to an end, though, critics of Chinese authoritarianism have begun to argue more regularly that an obsession with geming has contributed to the limitation of freedom in China. They have suggested that alternative visions of the future, which eschew the kind of “you are with us or against us” thinking that has so often fueled Chinese revolutionary struggles, are needed. The time had come, some argued, to say “geobie geming” (farewell to revolution), a phrase that became the title of a much discussed book by two important Chinese intellectuals, Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu. Another important text in this vein was That Holy Word ‘Revolution’, which imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo wrote in the early 1990s. Reflecting on the 1989 protests, which he had supported, he argued that veneration for the concept of Geming was something that had warped Chinese politics, even during that struggle, for it had become a political virus for which every citizen had become both a “victim and a carrier.”

As attractive as I found this idea of a short twentieth century, which focused on this theme of revolution and dovetailed nicely with Hobsbawm’s world history chronology, I ended up deciding that it wasn’t quite right. Searching for an alternative, I initially fixed on the idea of a Long Twentieth Century, lasting from Japan’s military victory over China in 1895 (an act signaling how far a once powerful nation had fallen) to the moment when I was writing early in the 2000s (when the Chinese state seemed headed toward superpower status).

In the end, though, I finally hit upon a kind of Goldilocks solution, neither too short nor too long, which would only seem novel and bold to a member of my guild. In China’s case, I wrote, the twentieth century had lasted exactly one hundred years and had started and ended right about when it should have (well, off by no more than a year or so), lasting from 1901 to 2001.

How did I justify the notion of a century-long century? One thing I stressed was the night and day contrast between China’s international position in two Septembers, those of 1901 and 2001. In the former month, the Boxer Crisis came to an end with the Qing being forced by foreign powers to sign a treaty with very disadvantageous terms. In the latter, George W. Bush sought Chinese support for the global “War on Terror” he had just proclaimed.

Featured image credit: Skyline – Hong Kong, China by Jim Trodel. CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Is it possible to experience time passing?

Suppose you had to explain to someone, who did not already know, what it means to say that time passes. What might you say? Perhaps you would explain that different times are arranged in an ordered series with a direction: Monday precedes Tuesday, Tuesday precedes Wednesday, and so on. But if time passes and space does not, then this cannot be the whole story. After all, locations in space are also ordered: London is to the north of Paris, Paris is to the north of Marseille, and so on. And even if space had an intrinsic direction, this would not make it the case that space passed. A direction only requires that there be an asymmetry; but a mere asymmetry would not explain the notion of passing.

Instead, you might appeal to experience. We experience time passing throughout our lives, or so it is claimed. Different people will give different accounts of the details. Some will emphasise the fact that experienced change, such as motion, has a dynamic quality that is absent from any spatial analogue, such as a difference in the weather between London and Paris. Others will emphasise the feeling that we are located at a single moment, the present time, but we constantly “move” through time, away from the past and toward the future. Perhaps others will appeal to the role of memory. But whatever the details, it may seem clear that there is some aspect of the way we experience time that allows us to grasp what is meant by “the passage of time”, and that tells us that time is indeed passing. Nothing, you may say, could be more familiar.

Unfortunately, however, things are not as they seem. The first sign of trouble lies in the fact that, as many physicists have noted, the passage of time does not feature explicitly in descriptions of the world couched in the vocabulary of physics. This is not to assume, question-beggingly, that time, as it features in physics, does not pass. It is just to say that physics requires only that there be a time series, and says nothing about one time being present, or time passing. Questions about the passage of time belong to metaphysics, not physics. But although we can adjudicate between competing theories of physics through observation, we cannot normally do the same for metaphysics. Putative metaphysical features are of the wrong kind to be possible objects of experience.

Astronomical Clock Face by Judith. CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

There are many ways to see the problem. Here is one: in order for experience to tell us something about the world, our experiences must have an appropriate sensitivity to the way things are. Your visual experience tells you about the words that you are reading because your visual experiences are sensitive to what is written. Had the words been different, the configuration of your brain, and thus your experience, would have been different in a corresponding way. If, instead, your experiences would have been the same, regardless of what was written, then you would not really be seeing.

There is no way for experience to be sensitive to whether or not time passes. This would require that the state of one’s brain be sensitive to whether or not time passes; and this cannot be so. For if we compare two theories that agree on which sentences of physics are true, but disagree on whether time passes, then because the two theories agree about which physical events occur, they cannot differ in what they say about the configuration of anyone’s brain. So, whether or not time passed, your experiences would be exactly as they actually are.

Here is another way to see the problem: As you read this page, there is an element of your visual experience, E, that concerns the words that you are reading, and other elements that concern the edge of the page, the side of the computer monitor, and so on. There is no deep mystery about how the elements and their objects match up. There is, for example, a single causal chain that leads from the words to E, and no similar chain from the words to any other element of experience. But the supposed passage of time would affect the whole physical world in the same way. Consequently it is hard to see what could make it the case that any one aspect of your experience, rather than any other, concerned the passage of time.

If, as suggested above, we have no way to grasp what it means for time to pass except through experience, and if, as I have argued, no experience could really be an experience of time passing, then we cannot claim to properly understand what it would be for there to be a mind-independent passage of time. The claim that time really passes is therefore empty, and should be abandoned. Instead, although there is a time series, there is no single ‘now’, and no passage. This raises the question of why we experience time in the way that we do. Answering this question is an important, fascinating and neglected project for metaphysics and the philosophy of mind.

Featured image: Clock by geralt. Public domain via Pixabay.

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Transforming libraries in Myanmar: The e-Library Myanmar Project

I have been a lifelong librarian in Myanmar since 1985. It is a great pleasure and honor to share the challenges and success of the e-Library Myanmar Project implemented by EIFL. During the darkest years until 2011, when all information was cut off, I stayed a librarian because I believe in the power of information to improve and transform the libraries and the lives of the librarians in the academic society. For universities, the impact of being cut off from the international community was distressing: scholarship and teaching stagnated; university infrastructure decayed; library collections were limited and out of date, and books were falling apart.

Now Myanmar has a new democratic government and is emerging from decades of isolation – bringing many challenges and many opportunities – and one of the most important is the reform of Higher Education.

Within this context, the impact of the e-Library Myanmar Project is to support educational change by increasing the availability and usage of e-resources to faculty and students and strengthening the role of libraries in improving teaching and research.

We started with two major universities, the universities of Yangon and Mandalay, and soon other universities started approaching us. We simply could not say no. There are now seven partner universities, among them two universities are located in suburban areas, 30 miles away from downtown. 166,000 students and 4,000 academic staff at seven universities in Myanmar now have 24 hour access to more than 14,000 scholarly journals and 150,000 eBooks. EIFL negotiated access to over 40 e-resources and a license to EDS.

“Students copy shop Yangon university” by Insights Unspoken, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr

There are many challenges:

The role of librarians and libraries had been ignored for five decades, and the importance of libraries and the enhancement of librarians’ capacity was also overlooked
Low bandwidth (but no internet at all until the project!)
Difficult for institutions to get static IP addresses
Unreliable electricity supply, especially in summer
Rote learning has been the norm for decades
Some librarians and faculty have poor IT, English language and information literacy skills
Very few libraries are equipped with quality books. Most books in Myanmar libraries are outdated or damaged
Budget constraint on Foreign Exchange Currency in government institutions, resulting in poor collections, especially in foreign literature

There was no library cooperation in the past, but a consortium of academic libraries launched in May 2016 and this will allow for more universities, if they can get IP address and internet access, to benefit from e-resources negotiated by EIFL.

Levels of enthusiasm and desire for change among the faculty and librarians is overwhelming, and has given the project great momentum. How it was done:

Training for librarians

First, training was provided to librarians on topics from basic information literacy to an introduction to online resources. We interviewed librarians to identify those with aptitude to become trainers (advanced group), and trained all library staff on everything from how to use email and its etiquette to how to search e-resources. We provided additional training for the advanced group of librarians, including advanced search/information literacy skills, presentation skills, the importance of building close links with faculty, and how to use Facebook to communicate with users.

Training for faculty and students

A 2-day training session was provided to faculty and students in every department. Advanced librarians gave presentations and provided hands-on support during the sessions.

General awareness raising and advocacy

Facebook pages have been set up and managed by librarians who are now posting regularly about e-resources and training. Head Librarians now have confidence to raise issues directly with university rectors: results include new computer equipment, improved bandwidth, and air conditioning units.

Over 9,000 faculty, students, and librarians are now trained in how to use high quality e-resources effectively. The e-library project has had great impact:

Huge increase in the skills, capacity, and confidence of librarians, and growing relationships between libraries and faculty
Librarians have become Master Trainers and are competent and confident in supporting students and faculty with new technologies and e-resources
Through training and support from newly created departmental ‘Power-user groups’ faculty and students become confident in finding e-resources
Subject guides including licensed and OA resources which are developed jointly by librarians and faculty are a testimony to the successful integration of library services with teaching and research
High usage statistics are an indicator of a successful training program for librarians, faculty, and students
Regular posts on new library Facebook pages (the University of Yangon Library has received over 6,173 friend requests since May 2014!). It heralds a new way of marketing library resources and services
Increased profile of libraries among academic society – the library is a serious player in education reform

The project is a catalyst for changes such as investment by universities in technological infrastructure (new fiber internet lines; elibrary training room with computers, laptops etc).

Scholars in Myanmar are very keen to offer their own content. The key is open access — a concept widely known internationally but little known in Myanmar. Since learning about open access through workshops organised by EIFL, the universities of Mandalay and Yangon have formed working groups to develop institutional repositories and open access policies.

Librarians have embraced the power of cooperation and sharing in the form of the newly born Myanmar Academic Library Consortium, which will be, jointly with EIFL, the partner for negotiations of e-resources for academic libraries in Myanmar. The eLibrary Myanmar Project is a milestone for librarians in Myanmar and they are now leading the way in helping faculty and students to integrate high-quality e-resources into their teaching and research activities, thereby transforming academic outputs. The project provides a modern library environment for the higher education system in Myanmar. This change happened quickly; from very old print journals to updated online journals in less than two years.

Featured image: “Bagan Temples” by KX Studio, CC BY 2.0 via Flickr

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Not just dots on a map: life histories alleviate spatial amnesia in San Francisco

The #OHMATakeover of the OHR blog continues as Audrey Augenbraum explores Anti-Eviction Mapping Project organizer Manissa Maharawal’s idea of “spatial amnesia” and engaging with public dialogues surrounding neighborhood change. Stay tuned to the OHR blog throughout the month of July for additional pieces from OHMA students and alumni, and come back in August for a return to our regularly scheduled program. For more from Columbia’s oral history program, visit them online or follow their blog.

For Manissa Maharawal, the struggle for housing justice is personal. When her own father got displaced from his apartment in Prospect Heights—his home since moving from India to the States some thirty years before, in which he raised his family—she was struck by his unstoppable urge to tell the story over and over again. “Why do people need to tell?” she wondered. Why was her father repeating his story to neighbors, to cab drivers, to mailmen, to anyone who would listen?

Maharawal began her workshop at Columbia’s Oral History Masters program’s series on Oral History and Public Dialogue by proposing the idea of “spatial amnesia” in urban contexts. Our city is changing—and fast—but almost incomprehensibly. Sure, there are visible symptoms of it, especially in New York City: the gargantuan Whole Foods going up on 125th Street, the eclectic mix of working families and young students in many neighborhoods of North Brooklyn, even explicit condemnations of gentrifiers on billboards posted outside churches or graffitied on Work in Progress: Residential notices in empty lots. There are the indignities of being priced out, of being evicted, of doubling up with family members and friends, of not being able to hang out on the streets of your own neighborhood. There is the insidious realization that folks from outside your neighborhood are entering it as consumers, buying expensive, boutique versions of the food you eat and the clothes you wear. Certainly, there is never any shortage of rumors, legends, or nostalgic laments about the way things were. But really—how were they? Who remembers?

One problem is, there’s no sense of the whole—the scale of change throughout the city. Worse, there’s no sense of the history of these changes, of the protracted dialogue between two or more communities that has been taking place for decades. Being able to buy $8 artisanal mayonnaise in Bushwick isn’t an abomination of only the last ten or fifteen years. These ironies are the results of processes that unfold over the course of entire life histories; and life histories, in turn, can help us encapsulate and preserve the original spirit of these neighborhoods.

“lower haight anti-hipster stencil” by jeremy avnet, CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

That’s Maharawal’s intervention, in the context of the San Francisco tech boom. The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project: Narratives of Displacement maps no-fault evictions and collects and attaches interviews with the victims of these evictions, creating a living archive that deconstructs the collusion between tech-industry corporate interests and the city. It’s a wedding of data visualization and narrative that ensures no one is reduced to a dot on a map. And these aren’t eviction stories alone—they’re life narratives, which come much closer to capturing the complex, subtle processes comprising neighborhood change that we are embedded in. These “located” narratives provide an antidote to our spatial amnesia.

True to the series theme, the project directly engaged with public dialogues in San Francisco—even beyond helping Internet users, zine readers, and mural appreciators visualize evictions, buyouts, fires, and the influence of Wall Street landlords. For example, in 2013, protesters blockaded Google and Apple shuttle buses to articulate growing fears among San Francisco residents that the appearance of a private tech-industry shuttle bus stop in the neighborhood was a harbinger of eviction. In solidarity, the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project mapped the increase in these bus stops for 2011-13 and overlaid them on their eviction maps. They found that, during that time period, evictions increased 69% within four blocks of a shuttle bus stop. A 2014 study they cite corroborates the implications of these findings—that these bus stops are a significant factor in tech workers’ residential choice.

Of course, this evidence isn’t conclusive. It is likely that the shuttle bus stops are just as much symptoms of a larger gentrification process already underway as they are accelerators of that process. No matter—the success, for me, was that the map responded to residents’ fears, validated bus protesters’ actions in the face of criticism, mounted a convincing call for further research, and made this issue legible to broader publics.

The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project also maps killings by law enforcement from 1985 to 2015, so that they can be understood in the context of San Francisco’s gentrifying neighborhoods. This map was created in honor of Alejandro Nieto, who was killed by the SFPD on March 21, 2014. Joey Vaez, a project narrator and good friend of Nieto, sees increased police violence in Bernal Heights and greater San Francisco in part as a result of the changing communities in the neighborhood. He describes a town hall meeting in which the “new community,” voicing concerns about youth, gangs and crack, called for more of a police presence in the area:

What people don’t understand is—what more police enforcement does is, it gives them carte blanche to do whatever they want. And so they would come, they would rough people up. You know, I was roughed up in front of my house.

Life narratives can powerfully expose the nexus of gentrification and ever-entrenched structural racism that, unfortunately, so many in this country still deny. Taken together, maps and narratives allow us to pinpoint each tragedy in time and space, and ask, How did we end up here? At once, the viewer is able to perceive the killings concretely, as events, and abstractly, as structuring a status quo. In this way, the project informs public dialogue by providing a spatial and temporal awareness that contextualizes the disturbing and often bewildering visible symptoms of these obscured and elongated processes.

Introducing the situation in San Francisco over the last few decades, Maharawal said, “What’s happening? Same thing as New York City, but accelerated.” As a native New Yorker and former resident of three boroughs, I also cannot help but compare the two. “Gentrification”—the process by which high-income households replace low-income households in a neighborhood—is a confusing, ambiguous and controversial term for many New Yorkers. For some, it refers to the racism and classism undergirding the displacement of disenfranchised groups. For others, it connotes economic revitalization and the promise of clean streets and safe community spaces. For still others, it means the commodification of their culture for the consumption of outsiders—consumption from which they are excluded.

In my own experience talking to residents of fast-gentrifying neighborhoods, it doesn’t take too long to realize that opinions can’t always be predicted by incomes, ethnicities, or even length of residency. Moreover, many New Yorkers are unsure of whom to blame—wealthy prospective residents and their homogenizing tastes? Predatory landlords? Mayoral rezoning schemes? Ambitious and market-savvy real estate agents? Global trends toward a capitalist cosmopolitanism that rewards the jet setting elite?

In this respect, San Francisco and New York don’t compare: against the ambivalence I’ve observed in my own city, the San Francisco case now presented to me seemed shockingly black and white. The invasion of the tech industry, supported by Mayor Ed Lee, spurred a cascade of negative consequences for long-time residents of San Francisco. Okay, I’m convinced that tech is the enemy. But why did tech move there?

 One of the unique qualities of oral history research is its ability to marshal a 360-degree view of an issue. It can contain a multiplicity of perspectives, and still be revelatory of a vision.

That’s why, despite the fact that my own sympathies lie with those displaced, I’d also be interested in hearing narratives from other players—the landlords who push their tenants out, or the wealthy new residents who are favored by these unjust acts. Granted, we are shown some of the machinations of ‘the other side’—as with this map of Wall Street landlords in California—but not first person accounts. In order to effectively fight gentrification and displacement, we also need their stories and motives, in their terms. Exploring what structures the decisions of tech industry gentrifiers and predatory landlords is a crucial piece of the project of alleviating spatial amnesia, of understanding how we got here. This understanding is empowering because it enables a complete picture of what needs to change, and how we might begin.

The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project portrays historical processes of neighborhood change beautifully, and could render them in all of their complexity. One of the unique qualities of oral history research is its ability to marshal a 360-degree view of an issue. It can contain a multiplicity of perspectives, and still be revelatory of a vision.

This post was originally published on the OHMA blog. Add your voice the conversation by chiming into the discussion in the comments below, or on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Google+.

Featured image: “Photograph of Butler Library, Columbia University’s largest single library.” by JSquish, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons. 

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Matters of the past mattering today

The past can be very important for those living in the present. My research experiences as an archaeologist have made this very apparent to me. Echoes from the distant past can reverberate and affect the lives of contemporary communities, and interpretations of the past can have important ramifications. Varied contemporary issues related to politics, cultural heritage management, tourism, development, sovereignty, and ethnogenesis can all be tied to reconstructions of the past.

This kind of dynamic is evident across many countries today, particularly those that have experienced recent histories of conflict, regime change, or newly gained independence. One does not need to look very far to see poignant connections between the archaeological past and the politics, lives, aspirations, and agendas of different communities. Millennia after Roman imperial domination, the appropriation of a Celtic past in parts of Europe has been significant in efforts to construct national identities. In Belgium, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, monuments stand today to commemorate Celtic tribal leaders who challenged Roman hegemony, even though knowledge of these leaders is sometimes based on sketchy history and scant archaeological evidence. After independence from French colonial rule, successive regimes in Cambodia each emphasized real or imagined links to an ancient and glorious Angkorian Empire. On the Korean Peninsula, professional archaeology began during the Japanese annexation period and in the ensuing years, after independence and civil war, tremendous weight was placed on the origins of a Korean ethnic identity. From these and countless other examples, it is clear a distinct connection exists between the symbolic capital of the ancient past and the variegated social and political needs of the present.

My current research on ancient Vietnam can be viewed against this backdrop. Like elsewhere, the past here has been closely connected to national identity. With a long history of complex interactions with numerous Chinese regimes throughout the past two millennia, capped by colonial encounters with the French throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it is little wonder that concerns over nationalism and postcolonial identity would come to have such a powerful effect on the constructions of a Vietnamese past and cultural identity.

Statue of Cao Lo at Co Loa, commemorating the legendary military advisor or holy man that produced the mythical crossbow for the Au Lac king. Photo courtesy of Nam C. Kim, used with permission.

Ask anyone in Vietnam to name the geographic crucible for Vietnamese early history and civilization, and the answer is Vietnam’s northern region, that of the Red River Valley. Being adjacent to southern China, the history of this region and of embryonic Vietnamese civilization is thus inseparable from that of China. The two civilizations share a long and complicated history of interaction. One particularly impactful era began at an ascribed date of 111 BCE, when the imperial Chinese Han commenced a process of annexation over this region and precipitated what are known as the periods of Chinese domination. A Chinese authority would hold power here almost continuously until the tenth century CE. After independence from China and throughout the ensuing millennium, Vietnamese royal court chroniclers and scholars sought to describe a deep Vietnamese history, one with roots firmly planted in the Red River Valley prior to Han annexation. As part of these efforts, various folk tales and traditions were officially recorded.

A prominent feature in these folk tales is the ancient capital city known as Co Loa. Romanticized accounts tell of its emergence as the seat of power for the legendary Au Lac Kingdom at 258 BCE. According to legend, the king possessed a magic crossbow that could vanquish all enemies, not unlike Excalibur in Arthurian tales from the UK. Analogous to Camelot, Co Loa holds significance within a Vietnamese collective imagination, and its remains still sit on the landscape today outside Hanoi.

I have had the great privilege of collaborating with Vietnamese archaeologists at Co Loa, the largest site of the region. Our ongoing research has not yielded indisputable proof of the Au Lac Kingdom’s existence, at least not in my estimation. Nevertheless, for me, questions about the existence of legendary kingdoms, while truly fascinating, may not be the most important. Perhaps the most significant aspect of our research is that we have vital new data indicating Co Loa emerged sometime around the third century BCE, predating a Han imperial footprint in northern Vietnam. This allows us to conclude that a local and powerful society did indeed exist in this time and place, adding a vital case study to knowledge about emergent civilizations in Southeast Asia. Just as importantly, the evidence confers a measure of cultural power upon this archaeological story, replete with artifacts, remnant architecture, and sacred landscapes. The archaeology amply shows us that today’s Vietnamese cultural identities are complex products of cultural interactions and development that began thousands of years ago.

Popular notions of archaeology conjure up images of ancient relics and sites, but archaeologists are very aware that the material record of past lifeways is composed of more than just artifacts and ruins. Powerful meanings can also be heavily inscribed in landscapes, making certain locations culturally important, perhaps even sacred. For the Vietnamese today, the site of Co Loa – along with its assemblage of surrounding landscapes, remnant architecture, and artifacts – all serve as a wellspring of cultural potency for contemporary matters related to ethnicity, identity, and heritage.

In the end, I have been fortunate to be both participant and witness for an elaborate dance between the worlds of the living and the dead. As archaeologists, we give voice to the peoples of the past and need to be mindful in how our theories, interpretations, and reconstructions can be consumed, reconstituted, and repurposed by others. Artifacts, ancient monuments, and landscapes can all undergo transformations into cultural capital. The past, whether real, tangible, embellished, or imagined, can be a particularly powerful and alluring source of symbols, narratives, and ideas.

Featured image credit: An entrance to the innermost area of Co Loa. Currently, this area is the site for the temple, known as Den Thuong, dedicated to the Au Lac king. Photo courtesy of Nam C. Kim, used with permission.

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Zika, sex, and mosquitoes: Olympic mix

Zika continues its romp around the world. In its wake, controversy erupted over the Olympic Games in Brazil, with some calling to move or postpone the Games – but is that really justified? Zika has already moved outside of Brazil in a big way.

To be clear, the Zika epidemic is dramatic and awful. Mosquito-borne transmission of this previously obscure and seemingly wimpy virus is ongoing in 60 countries, and it has already left a trail of dire neurological and developmental disruptions that will hobble families and communities for decades. This is a virus that has been full of surprises – a virus that is spread by a mosquito and also by sex! There aren’t many precedents for that, and no one knows what may come next.

Why Zika? Why now? And, by the way, what can an individual who plans to attend the Olympic Games do?

Why did Zika explode onto the world stage? Did humans create the conditions to allow this virus to escape Africa and Asia to become established in tropical and subtropical areas throughout the world? Massive urban growth continues, especially in low income, low latitude areas, places that are hot and poor. Explosive growth in international travel connects large, dense, tropical urban centers and adjacent slum areas with all parts of the world. Mosquito vectors, competent to transmit multiple viruses that can sicken humans, have been introduced via trade (e.g., along with used tires and plants) into many areas. Vector control programs have failed for many reasons, including lack of support, poor infrastructure, and resistance of mosquitoes to insecticides. Infected humans on international flights transport viruses in blood and other tissues. Warmer temperatures may have been an accelerant in some areas. We have created conditions conducive to Zika virus movement and establishment.

Other hypotheses about the reasons Zika virus spread rapidly include mutation in the virus to allow it to replicate to higher levels, to allow more efficient spread, and to become more virulent and attack neurologic tissues. Zika epidemics have appeared in areas pummeled by repeated dengue epidemics. Does prior infection (or multiple prior infections) with dengue virus, a related flavivirus, lead to antibody-dependent enhancement? Under these circumstances, prior infection with a related virus, instead of protecting the host, paradoxically leads to higher virus replication and more severe disease.

These and other key questions will be answered by research in progress, but we have already learned a lot about this virus. It can be transmitted sexually via semen. It is also present in saliva, urine, and breast milk, but transmission via these fluids has not been documented, to date. The virus has been found in wild populations of Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus in the Americas. Based on abundance and distribution, Aedes aegypti is thought to be the most important vector in the Americas. Bad news!

Aedes aegypti originated in Africa and is now found in tropical and subtropical areas worldwide. It is extremely well adapted to contemporary urban life. It can breed in small collections of water (plastic trash, bottle caps, used tires), bites during the daytime, lives in homes (can be found in closets, under beds), prefers human blood, and may feed on multiple humans if its feeding is interrupted. It is competent to transmit many viruses, including dengue, yellow fever, and chikungunya. This means that any areas with dengue transmission (encompassing almost half the global population) are also at risk for Zika virus transmission. More bad news!

Aedes aegypti has been extremely difficult to control especially in dense urban communities, such as those that lack reliable piped water and have lots of trash. The good news is that controlling Aedes mosquitoes would also help control other infections like dengue and chikungunya.

Skyline of Salvador, Brazil by Hentzer. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Fortunately the Olympic Games will take place during the cooler and drier months in Rio de Janeiro, a time when mosquito populations are low and dengue transmission limited. Vector control interventions in Rio have also been expanded in preparation for the Olympic Games. Some of the football (soccer) matches will occur at other venues, like Manaus and Salvador, where conditions may be more favorable than Rio for mosquitoes in August.

Mosquito populations in Rio may be low during the games, but sexual transmission of Zika is unaffected by temperature and rainfall. Persons who attend the Olympic Games could acquire infections through sexual contact with other attendees who come from areas with ongoing Zika transmission. Those attending the games should protect themselves by using mosquito repellents – but they should also protect themselves against sexual transmission by using condoms. Sexual transmission from male-to-female and male-to-male has been reported and possible female-to-male transmission. A man who is infected can potentially transmit infection in two ways: via a mosquito vector during the few days the virus is in the bloodstream and sexually via semen, which may contain virus for a month or longer. One report found viral RNA in semen 62 days after infection. Virus has also been found in the female genital tract. Because the majority of Zika infections are asymptomatic, precautions should be taken for sexual contact with anyone who is from or has recently visited an area with active Zika transmission. The use of barrier protection should take account of the potential long persistence of virus in semen (longer than a month).

Attendees also need to be mindful of their potential to transmit after they return home. A person who becomes infected (with or without symptoms) could be a source of virus for a mosquito that could transmit infection if it is hot enough in that area for the virus to replicate and disseminate in the mosquito before it dies or is killed. Typically it takes at least a week or two (in hot weather) for this to occur. In cooler areas, a mosquito, even if it bit someone with virus in the bloodstream, would likely die before it could transmit the virus. Persons who recently visited Zika-transmission areas should not donate blood.

Those going to the Olympic Games can prepare by understanding routes of transmission and by using repellents and condoms during the games. After the Games, they also should understand how to prevent onward spread if they live in an area with competent mosquito vectors or are sexually active (men). That being said, accumulated evidence suggests the risk of a major Zika outbreak during the Olympic Games in Rio is low. Zika has already delivered many surprises. There is reason to believe the Olympic Games will not deliver one more.

Featured image credit: Mosquito by Mikadago. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.

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What music would Shakespeare’s characters listen to?

Shakespeare’s characters can often appear far-removed from our modern day world of YouTube, Beyoncé, and “grime”. Yet they were certainly no less interested in music than we are now, with music considered to be at the heart of Shakespeare’s artistic vision. Of course our musical offerings have come a long way since Shakespeare’s day, but we think it is a shame that Juliet or Macbeth never had the chance to hear the delights of Katy Perry or Slipknot. So to celebrate Shakespeare’s relationship with music, we’ve imagined what playlists some of his most famous characters would have listened to. Explore our choices below, and let us know if you agree or disagree:

Henry V

As the Battle of Agincourt approaches, what playlist would get Henry V pumped up and ready to give his soldiers the rousing speech they need? We’re pretty sure the St. Crispin’s Day speech could have been inspired by ‘Danger Zone’ by Kenny Loggins. In the lead up to the battle Henry would also likely be working out every day, and would definitely need the ultimate gym tune: ‘All I Do is Win’ by DJ Khaled.

Juliet

It was Romeo who said “How silver-sweet sound lovers’ tongues by night, Like softest music to attending ears!”. That might be so during the early romantic stage, but what music would help a thirteen year old Juliet, once her father tells her she will be married against her will to Count Paris? It is far more likely she would find solace in these choice lyrics of ‘Rules Don’t Stop’ by We Are Scientists: “This is no time to behave/Let’s both get carried away”. Although we don’t think drinking a potion – making her family believe she is dead and leading to the untimely death of herself and Romeo – was quite what they had in mind.

Juliet by John William Waterhouse (with additional headphones). Original image, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Hamlet

Hamlet had music on his mind in his conversation with Rozencrantz and Guildenstern: “Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me.” Do we think it is fair that Hamlet is sometimes referred to as the ‘original emo’? Perhaps not, but his angst and confusion at the state of the world would surely have allowed him to relate to Gary Jules’ ‘Mad World’.

Titania

While at the mercy of Oberon and Puck’s tricks, we believe the fairy queen Titania from A Midsummer Night’s Dream would maintain her proud and regal exterior with powerful compositions from Beethoven and Vivaldi. A spot of Mozart would be a perfect choice for her question to Bottom: “What, wilt thou hear some music, my sweet love?”.

Beatrice

Beatrice from Much Ado about Nothing – witty, fiery and assertive – would “rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves me”. Arguably the strongest of all Shakespeare’s female characters, she would certainly enjoy a bit of Chaka Khan and Beyoncé. If another musical version of the play were produced, we think her wonderful repartee with Benedick could be set to ‘You’re so Vain’ by Carley Simon.

Benedick

At the beginning of Much Ado about Nothing Benedick vows to remain a bachelor forever… before meeting his match in Beatrice. The will-they, won’t-they, back and forth between the two lesser-romantic characters of the play could be set to ‘Hot N Cold’ by Katy Perry. After the spikey word-play between them, Benedick is often left outsmarted. It’s a shame he couldn’t play ‘I Love You/You Suck’ by Reel Big Fish as a fitting and eloquent response.

Macbeth

Once Macbeth had received a (pre-murdering) pep talk from his wife Lady Macbeth, he was still showing signs of some nagging self-doubts. He didn’t want to kill King Duncan, and seemed to have some fairly well-founded concerns about that. However, it may have helped to get him in the zone by listening to ‘Raining Blood’ by Slayer or ‘Smasher/Devourer’ by Fear Factory.

Helena

Helena spends most of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in emotional turmoil having been jilted by Demetrius and still pining after him. Although her love is eventually returned, thanks to fairy magic, we think the playlist below would have made a wonderful 90’s-style mixtape for her unrequited love.

Featured image credit: Scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Edwin Landseer (with additional headphones). Original image, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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A Q&A with Katie Stileman, Publicist for the VSI series

Katie Stileman works as the UK Publicist for Oxford University Press’s Very Short Introductions series (VSIs). She tells us a bit about what working for OUP looks like.

When did you start working at OUP?

In January 2013, after abandoning my plans of pursuing a Medieval Literature PhD for a more glamorous life in academic publishing.

What is your typical day like at OUP?

My job is split pretty equally between events planning, social media, and liaising with the media to find opportunities for promoting OUP books and products through different channels. At the moment we are building up to the 500th VSI title in October with a year-long Road Show of events across the country, so a lot of my day is spent putting that together! I pitch review and feature ideas to journalists and also send out press copies of VSIs and the other books I cover to the media for review.

Open the book you’re currently reading and turn to page 75. Tell us the title of the book, and the third sentence on that page.

“Karunandhi scripted Manthiri Kumari/The Minister’s Daughter (1950), a ‘folklore’ film that brought the future superstar-politician his first commercial success.” (Indian Cinema: A Very Short Introduction by Ashish Rajadhyaksha)

What’s the first thing you do when you get to work in the morning?

Tweet from @OWC_Oxford.

What’s your favourite book?

The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton. It’s full of #teenangst and there’s a brilliant film adaptation starring a young Patrick Swayze alongside the then practically unknown Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon, Rob Lowe, Diane Lane, Emilio Estevez, and  Leif Garrett.

What drew you to work for OUP in the first place? What do you think about that now?

I’m a sucker for a brand and OUP has the best in academic publishing, and one of the best in the industry as a whole. I came to work at OUP as a stepping stone into trade publishing and never left! Our authors are some of the most influential and fascinating people in the world, and the books they write really matter and make a different to it.

Tell us about one of your proudest moments at work.

Accompanying author Louisa Lim when she was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, Britain’s most prestigious award for political writing, for her incredible book on Tienanmen Square, The People’s Republic of Amnesia.

As well as VSIs Katie Stileman loves Taylor Swift and foxes, both of which are demonstrated in this picture.

What is the strangest thing currently on or in your desk?

Among the mountainous piles of import VSIs which have been delivered from the US office, I have several lego figures of my friends and pictures of baby rabbits, but the strangest thing by far is the long creeping vine which winds its way around my monitor. It grew out of a ‘Flowering Tea Cup’ arrangement that my colleague Anna gave me in March 2015, which bears the lable ‘Guaranteed for 2 Weeks’…

Who inspires you most in the publishing industry and why?

I have an incredible team at OUP who work on different subjects across our Global Academic Division. Our manager Kate has worked in the industry for many years and has a great network of relationships which benefit OUP and our authors hugely, from festival organizers such as Hay Festival director Peter Florence (who name-drops her as an ‘influencer’ in a recent Bookseller feature) to journalists and radio producers. My predecessor on the VSIs was Chloe Foster who organised the first ever VSI ‘Speed Dating’ evening, and established our VSI Soap Box events across several major festivals. They are all brilliant publicists and great fun to work with – as I write this we are planning a post-work trip out on the OUP punt!

If you didn’t work in publishing, what would you be doing?

PR for T-Swift, obviously.

Featured image credit: VSI series. Image used with permission.

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Suicide and the First Amendment

What does suicide have to do with the first amendment right to free speech? As it turns out, the question comes up in many contexts:

Can a state university student be disciplined for sending a text threatening suicide to another student?
Can a young woman be criminally prosecuted for repeatedly texting her boyfriend to insist that he fulfill his intention to commit suicide?
At what point can an organization supporting assisted suicide be prevented from promoting its views? Should it matter if that organization is targeting one person as opposed to a larger group of people?

Each of these questions have come up in recent court decisions at both the state and federal levels. In Doe v. George Mason University, a student at George Mason University in Virginia was investigated after complaints involving unwanted sexual activity with a student at another university. As their relationship collapsed, he texted her that if she did not respond to his messages he would shoot himself. Because of this suicide threat, he was charged with, among other things, violating a George Mason student code rule prohibiting using “communication that may cause injury, distress, or emotional or physical discomfort.” The student was expelled, and while most of the court’s decision focused on whether he had received sufficient notice and hearing, it did devote a portion of the opinion to the suicide threat. Finding that a threat to one’s self (not others) was protected by the first amendment, the court held that, while the student could be “sequestered” for a few hours to investigate whether his threat to shoot himself posed a threat to the school or its students, he could not be punished simply for sending a text, even if its sole intention was to cause its recipient emotional distress.

“Can a young woman be criminally prosecuted for repeatedly texting her boyfriend to insist that he fulfill his intention to commit suicide?”

In Massachusetts, meanwhile, a young woman’s texts were deemed to have a more lethal purpose: to coerce her boyfriend into killing himself. When Michelle Carter’s boyfriend, Conrad Roy, appeared to be backing out of his decision to kill himself through asphyxiation in his car, she texted him repeatedly: “The time is right and you’re ready, you just need to do it” and “You can’t think about it, you just have to do it. You said you were gonna do it. Like I just don’t get why you aren’t.” When Roy weakened and left his car, one witness testified that Carter reported telling Roy, “Get back in that car!” Carter was charged with involuntary manslaughter. Her defense included the claim that her texts were protected under the first amendment. In Commonwealth v. Carter, the highest court in Massachusetts held that the state’s compelling interest in deterring speech that has a direct, causal link to a specific victim’s suicide trumped Carter’s first amendment rights. Instead, the court decided for the first time that a person who is not physically present can be indicted for homicide based on contemporaneous text or telephone messages that amount to coercing an individual to commit suicide, finding that the messages amounted to a “virtual presence.” The court also rejected Carter’s argument that “…verbal conduct can never overcome a person’s willpower to live and therefore cannot be the cause of a suicide.”

Interestingly, the court went out of its way to explicitly emphasize that it was not criminalizing words used to provide support or even assistance to a mature adult who, confronted with a terminal illness, had decided to end his or her life.

This was probably a wise precaution. The first amendment rights of individuals and organizations supporting assisted suicide has come up already in the highest courts of several states. In Georgia, after indictment of members of the Final Exit Network for assisting the suicide of a man with cancer, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down the statute they were charged with violating, which criminalized “public advertisement” that an individual would assist a suicide (as long as the individual also took an overt action to further that purpose). Less than three months after the statute was stricken, the legislature enacted a constitutionally permissible statute. No prosecutions have taken place under the new law.

In Minnesota, the Supreme Court, like the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, considered the thorny issue of criminal responsibility for texting messages to encourage and even instruct a person to commit suicide. In State v. Melchert-Dinkel, the communications were between strangers: a male nurse who infiltrated web forums of suicidal people, and cajoled at least two individuals to kill themselves, imploring one to let him watch. The Minnesota Supreme Court struck down the criminalization of “encouraging” or “advising” suicide, but retained the crime of assisting suicide, defined as “enabling” someone to commit suicide. Although actions would more likely “enable” than words, the court left open the possibility that instructions would enable suicide. On remand, the lower courts followed the court’s implicit suggestion and Melchert-Dinkel was convicted on the basis of his detailed instructions to one victim as to exactly how to hang himself.

Featured image credit: Natures Magic Patterns of Gold, Chris Fort. Public domain via Flickr. 

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How much do you know about Hypatia? [quiz]

This July, the OUP Philosophy team honours Hypatia (c. 355—415)  as their Philosopher of the Month. An astronomer, mathematician, philosopher, and active public figure, Hypatia played a leading role in Alexandrian civic affairs. Her public lectures were popular, and her technical contributions to geometry, astronomy, number theory, and philosophy made Hypatia a highly regarded teacher and scholar. She was at one time the world’s foremost mathematician.

But how well do you know Hypatia’s life and work? Test your knowledge with the quiz below!

Quiz image credit: Portrait of Hypatia by Jules Maurice Gaspard. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Featured image credit: Photo of monument in Alexandria by Ben Snooks. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

 

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