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Key events and writings in contemporary Mormon feminism

Mormon feminism may seem to some a recent phenomenon, but events and writings in the history of Mormon feminism date back to the early 1970s. Here we have compiled these key moments in which Mormon women have engaged with questions about gender in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in a timeline of the pre-history and history of the Mormon feminist movement.

Featured image: Mormon women waiting to request to be admitted to the priesthood session at the LDS Conference Center in 2014. Photo by ordainmormonwomen, © Katrina Barker Anderson, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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(Getting a) Malling: Youth, consumption and leisure in the ‘new Glasgow’

The following extract is excerpted from Urban Legends: Gang Identity in the Post-Industrial City. The chapter, titled ‘Learning to Leisure’ traces the leisure lives of a group of young men from Langview, a deindustrialised working-class community in Glasgow. The boys – aged 14-16 during the period of fieldwork – demonstrated a clear desire for traditional forms of work and leisure, but found opportunities for both thin on the ground. As a result, their leisure lives often resulted in friction with the ‘new Glasgow’, which privileges privatised, commercialised and delocalised leisure.

A constant refrain of the children and young people I met in Langview – be it in LYP, on the street, in school, or elsewhere – was ‘this is pure borin.’ On further prompting, this was frequently followed by ‘there’s nuthin tae dae’, or ‘there’s nivir any’hin tae dae.’ The implication was not literal – in every case, there were options – but rather that everything there was to do had been done a hundred times before, and was therefore completely drained of any novelty, value, or creative potential. The streets had been walked a thousand times; the youth projects, shops, and public spaces visited and revisited until there was nothing left to excite any interest. In this context, the phrase ‘fir the buzz’ – for the excitement, for a laugh, for the sheer hell of it – is pivotal. When leisure time is spent in a constant round of dull monotony, exciting moments of spontaneity take on special significance. Whether it is pushing the edges of rules and acceptable behaviour in a youth project, testing security guards and police in commercial venues, or creating edgy excitement in public space, the group engage in activities ‘fir the buzz’; as a means of creating energy and spontaneity in a landscape of boredom.

Where various forms of leisure were once easily and cheaply available in local areas, these spaces have largely been replaced by out-of-town entertainment and shopping complexes, each containing the same multinational shops and restaurants. In addition, new digital leisure spaces have become mainstream, providing new opportunities for private, home-based communication and excitement. It might be imagined that youth leisure would move in-step with these changes, replacing old forms of leisure with new, and acceding to these new field arrangements. However, the Langview Boys demonstrated a clear desire not only for continuity in their leisure pursuits – finding ways of reproducing leisure habits in this new environment – but also in creating ‘fir the buzz’ excitement in the new cathedrals of consumerism. Their leisure activities therefore did not represent a clear or definable ‘break’ with previous generations, but a dialectical process of old and new, learning and re-imagining.

This shift in work and leisure is symbolised powerfully in the changes to one of the former industrial centres of Glasgow, the Parkhead Forge. The Forge was one of many large-scale hubs of industrial production that used to pattern the city of Glasgow. Employing over 20,000 at its peak in the early twentieth-century, and covering a site of some 25 acres, the Forge was integral to Glasgow’s shipbuilding economy; forging steel and iron plates for the ‘Clyde-built’ shipyards of Govan. The Forge finally closed its gates in 1976; in effect closing the door to Glasgow’s industrial past, leaving generations of skilled workers out in the cold. In a powerful piece of symbolism, as the City Council set about an aggressive strategy of neoliberal place-marketing and regeneration (McLeod 2002; Paton et al 2012), the site reopened as the Forge Shopping Centre in the late 1980s. In both a physical and metaphoric sense, shopping was feted as a replacement for industry (Charlesworth 2000). The workers were no longer left out in the cold, but beckoned into the airless warmth of consumerism.

Glasgow by amateur photography by Michel. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

In their search for edgework experiences, these new commercial spaces play a dual role for the Langview Boys – as centres for boredom-relief through consumption, and as spaces bound by rules and constraints that can be subverted and played with. Commercial spaces are viewed in the same light as public spaces, but with an added edge of control, authority, and supervision in the form of surveillance and security. As Presdee argues: ‘Young people, cut off from normal consumer power, invade the space of those with consumer power …. the ‘space invaders’ of the 1990s, lost in a world of dislocation and excitement; a space where they should not be’ (Presdee 1994: 182). As Gary and Mark describe:

Gary: We aw got a chase in Princes Square [high-end shopping mall], we aw got a game ae [man-] hunt an that so we could get a chase aff the security guard.

AF: Did yous get a chase?

Gary: Naw, no really. They tried tae run, bit they jist did walkin.

Willie: See the couches? The couches you sit in. See Daz, he wis pushin Frankie oan wan ae they wee couches, an see they escalators, the wans that go doon, he pushed him oan that oan the couch. We wur aw laughin an that.

The Boys’ discussed doing this kind of thing repeatedly, in a number of different locations, but Princes Square is particularly symbolic of the ‘new Glasgow’ that has little place for young people like the Langview Boys. Princes Square, in the city centre of Glasgow, stands as a cogent example of the tensions involved in the ‘New Glasgow’… Whilst it may be a stretch to present The Langview Boys’ use of Princes Square as a playground as a noble effort to subvert the ‘new Glasgow’ that has marginalised their leisure, their behaviour undoubtedly offers a striking example of the consequences of changes in youth leisure over the past 40 years.

Featured image credit: Alleyway Artistry by Stevie Brown. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

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The day that changed the 20th century: Russia’s October Revolution

The October Revolution was probably the determining event of the twentieth century in Europe, and indeed in much of the world. The Communist ideology and the Communist paradigm of governance aroused messianic hopes and apocalyptic fears almost everywhere. In all European countries from the 1920s to the 1980s there were Communist parties – except where they were forbidden because of the fears they aroused, and even then some of them survived underground. Fascism and Nazism, vehemently nationalist and anti-Communist, became widely popular largely because of that fear.

The fear was justified. In the 1930s Stalin‘s regime instigated some of the most destructive policies any government has ever practised. It became obsessively centralised and authoritarian. The collectivisation of agriculture and accompanying dekulakisation (expropriation of ‘rich peasants’) caused a major famine and hobbled food production for decades to come. The ruling party leaders, gripped by their own millennial hopes and apocalyptic fears, broke into squabbling factions which Stalin was able to master only by unleashing a campaign of terror in which millions of people died, by firing squad or in forced labour camps.

The Second World War was the greatest confrontation between Communism and its enemies. Stalin’s terror, applied in the military, almost crippled the Soviet war effort at first, and it was a full eighteen months before the army was in a condition to exploit its homeland’s greater resources and drive the Germans out of the country. There followed the creation of a Soviet bloc, where Stalinist policies were imposed on the countries of Central Europe, often against the wishes of even the Communist leaders there. At the other end of Eurasia the Chinese Communists overcame Japanese fascism and then by its ruthless narrow-mindedness and recklessness caused a famine even more destructive than the Soviet one.

Yet Soviet Communism could boast of achievements too. Perhaps the greatest of them, despite the shaky start, was the defeat of Nazism. That would not have been possible without the programme of rapid industrialisation implemented by the Soviet regime from 1928 in the Five Year Plans. The Communists also launched and directed a programme of mass education at all levels, until almost universal literacy was attained. Scientific research and its technological application reached a very high level, dramatised by the launch of the first space satellite (Sputnik) in 1957, followed by the first manned spacecraft in 1961. Gradually too, the Soviet leaders created a welfare system which catered for the population’s needs in housing, transport, health care, education and guaranteed a basic security to everyone.

Nicholas II, former Tsar of Russia, taken after his abdication in March 1917. Public Domain via United States Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs division.

What then brought about the end of the Soviet Union? Its leaders held to the messianic promise of Marxist–Leninism, mixed with a good dose of Realpolitik, and they sought and tried to sustain great power status as an equal of the USA, the great capitalist adversary. The Cold War was the product of this ideological rivalry. In the long run the centrally directed Soviet economy proved too inflexible to keep up with the military innovations required for that purpose. The Soviet education system fostered an intelligentsia which became increasingly disillusioned with Communism and hankered after the greater cultural diversity and intellectual liveliness, as well as the greater affluence, of the West.

But there was another crucial factor too, another product of the paradoxical blend of Communist success and failure: the creation and/or consolidation of national identity among the various Soviet peoples. This was so contrary to Marxist principles that it needs dwelling on. In the 1920s the Soviet leaders aimed to encourage the administrative, linguistic and cultural development of the non-Russian peoples in theoretically autonomous national republics and to reduce the privileges of the hitherto dominant Russians, whom Lenin regarded as ‘chauvinists’. This was on the whole an enlightened and humanitarian concept. In practice, though, it gradually succumbed to the Communist leaders’ obsessive drive to control everything from above, i.e. from Moscow. The Five Year Plans ensured that each republic’s economy was developed, not for its own needs, but for those of the Union as a whole. Uzbekistan was required to concentrate on cotton production, even though its prime minister complained ‘We cannot eat cotton’. The highly centralised structure of the Soviet Communist Party ensured that little initiative was left in the hands of the non-Russian Communist leaders. Nationalities which had expected home rule were subject to a brutal dictatorship under Stalin.

Even worse things followed. When Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, West Belorussia and West Ukraine were annexed in 1939-40, most of their military officers and professional people were deported to Kazakhstan or Siberia, if not simply murdered. In some cases whole peoples were deported, like the Meskhetians and Crimean Tatars.

Joseph Stalin, whose regime instigated some of the most destructive policies any government has ever practiced. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

These contradictions ensured that national relationships were unstable. Many non-Russian peoples felt that in practice they had no freedom and little opportunity for developing their own culture, even though the Soviet Constitution promised them those benefits. Resentment was liable to burst out when governmental pressure was softened. Under  in the late 1980s it was the most resentful peoples who impelled the Soviet Union decisively towards collapse. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were the first to declare secession from the Soviet Union, while the referendum held in Ukraine on 1 December 1991 dealt the final death blow to it. In other words the most brutally treated peoples precipitated the break-up of the country.

Most Soviet peoples experienced that break-up as national liberation. For Russians, however, who had lived in all republics and thought of the Soviet Union as ‘their’ country, it was deprivation. That is a perception which still rankles today, and it underlies the current Ukrainian crisis. In that sense, the legacy of the October Revolution is still with us.

Featured image credit: The Bolshevik (1920), via The Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Can neuroscience explain consciousness?

Long excluded from serious consideration within psychology and the neurosciences, consciousness is back in business. A new journal, Neuroscience of Consciousness, will catalyse this new understanding by publishing the best new research, review, and opinion on how our “inner universe” comes to be. We sat down with the editor of the journal, Anil Seth, to learn a bit more about what is sometimes thought of as a problem beyond the reach of science.

*   *   *

What is consciousness?

It’s tricky to come up with a rigorous scientific definition of consciousness which enjoys a broad consensus. On the other hand, we are all familiar with what consciousness is. Put simply, for a conscious organism, there is ‘something it is like’ to be that organism. Put another way, consciousness is lost when falling into a dreamless sleep (or undergoing general anaesthesia), and it is what returns the next morning on waking up (or coming round). More generally, consciousness implies a continuous (but interruptible) stream of phenomenal senses or experiences – a technicolour, multimodal, fully immersive and wholly personalised movie, playing to an audience of one.

Why should consciousness be studied?

Studying consciousness scientifically is enormously important for several reasons. Most fundamentally, understanding the biological and physical bases of conscious experience will reframe how we see ourselves in nature, bringing one of the last remaining mysteries of life and the universe within the remit of science. More practically, it will open new avenues towards improved diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment for many neurological and psychiatric disorders that currently exert huge socioeconomic costs.

What are some of the neurological and psychiatric disorders associated with consciousness?

These can be divided into two classes. The most severe are neurological ‘disorders of consciousness’ like coma, the vegetative state, and the minimally conscious state, which involve a wholesale loss or diminution of consciousness. Other neurological conditions involving localised brain damage can lead to specific disturbances of conscious experience, depending on where the damage is. Psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia and depersonalisation disorder can also be usefully understood as arising from disruptions in the brain mechanisms that underlie normal conscious perception. Any condition that involves a change in the way we experience the world (or ourselves) can be addressed from the perspective of consciousness science.

“consciousness is lost when falling into a dreamless sleep … and it is what returns the next morning on waking up”

What first interested you in studying consciousness?

I was lucky to start my research career more or less at the time consciousness was becoming, after many years at the sidelines, re-established within psychology and the neurosciences. Being able to apply rigorous scientific methods to the challenge of consciousness was a very exciting prospect. And unlike other great scientific mysteries, consciousness is highly personal. The realisation that studying consciousness could make real practical differences in the clinic was also a strong motivation in pursuing this line of research, and one which is increasingly important to me.

What is involved in studying consciousness science?

The challenge for consciousness science is to connect phenomenal descriptions of how conscious experiences seem to the experiencer, to the complex biological and physical processes (unfolding across brains, bodies, and environments) on which they depend. This can be done for conscious level (for instance the difference between wakeful awareness and dreamless sleep), conscious content (the components of a conscious experience, including colours, smells, tastes, thoughts, and so on), and conscious self (the specific experience of being ‘I,’ including experiences of body ownership and of being a particular person over time). A satisfying explanation should also account for the functions of consciousness – what can we do in virtue of being conscious? – which may then shed light on how and why it evolved the way it did.

Consciousness science is fundamentally interdisciplinary. Today, it is a flourishing enterprise which engages neuroscientists, psychologists, computer scientists, clinicians, mathematicians, and physicists, with sociologists and anthropologists also joining the party. Consciousness is studied in psychiatric and neurological patients, in non-human animals and in healthy human volunteers (including infants), with experiments deploying increasingly powerful methodologies for acquiring, analysing, and connecting data of many different kinds, all brought together by powerful new theories and computational models.

What are some of these experiments?

There are so many brilliant experiments it’s hard to choose! In the area of conscious level, I have been impressed by recent findings that show how we can distinguish between different neurological disorders on the basis of a specific measure of the complexity of brain dynamics. In conscious content, I’d choose a classic study which shows the importance of ‘feedback’ or ‘reentrant’ connections in generating conscious perceptions, which has a new relevance with respect to popular ‘Bayesian’ theories of how the brain works. And then, in conscious self, one of our own articles used virtual reality to show that the brain puts together signals from inside the body (interoception) with visual information to determine whether a virtual ‘rubber hand’ is experienced as part of the body. But these just scratch the surface!

Photo by Guiliamar. CC0 Public domain via Pixabay.

Have you ever been surprised by the results of your experiments?

Yes, that’s part of the joy of science! In one recent experiment, we set out to train healthy adult volunteers to have synaesthetic experiences – in our case, to experience colours when seeing specific letters (this is ‘grapheme-colour’ synaesthesia). This had been tried before, with varying results; we decided to try a much more extensive and concentrated training regimen. Not only did most of our volunteers show behavioural evidence of synaesthesia, more surprising was that they reported having synaesthesia-like experiences as well! We’ve actually found even more interesting results in a follow up, but I can’t say anything more since we’re still writing the paper. But findings don’t have to be dramatic to be surprising and in science, you very rarely get exactly what you expect.

How is consciousness science different from neuroscience?

Studying consciousness is both broader and narrower than neuroscience in general. Broader, because a singular focus on brain mechanisms neglects the essential contributions of other disciplines to what is ultimately a question about the human (and perhaps non-human) condition. Narrower, because a lot of what the brain does seems to unfold independently of consciousness, or is at least highly indirectly related. For example, the cerebellum (the so-called ‘little brain’), while crucial for many cognitive and motor functions seems to have little to do with consciousness.

How can you describe the Neuroscience of Consciousness journal?

While we maintain an emphasis on empirical neuroscience studies in the journal, we are also keen to publish studies from other disciplines (or better, across multiple disciplines) that shed light on the biological basis of conscious experience. For this reason, we are delighted to be the official journal of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, which has long been the premier scientific organisation in this field and which has always promoted a multidisciplinary approach to consciousness science. The motivations and aims of the journal are discussed in our online Editorial but more importantly, perhaps just sit back and enjoy the little miracle of being conscious right here and right now.

Featured image credit: Neurons by geralt. CC0 public domain via Pixabay. 

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Announcing the Place of the Year 2015 shortlist: vote for your pick

Thank you to those of you who participated in the voting period for our Place of the Year 2015 longlist. The top five contenders have moved on to the next round into our shortlist, and we need your help again. If you’re interested about each place and why each has been nominated for Place of the Year 2015, read back on our previous blog post. Vote for your pick in this year’s shortlist by 30 November. The Place of the Year 2015 will be announced 3 December.

After you’ve voted, take a look at some basic voting data from our longlist poll. We received responses from 26 different countries around the world!

Place of the Year 2015 shortlist

Place of the Year 2015: longlist voting data


Create your own infographics

Keep checking back on the OUPblog, or follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr for regular updates and content on our Place of the Year 2015 contenders.

Headline image credit: Photo by StockSnap. Public domain via Pixabay.

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Six predictions for the future of the Religious Right

For more than forty years now, the Religious Right has been a powerful force in the United States, helping reshape the Republican Party and realign the nation’s politics and culture. Typically considered a grassroots movement of conservative Catholics, evangelicals, and Mormons, and the political organizations that mobilized their efforts in the 1970s and 1980s, the Religious Right’s intellectual and ideological origins trace back further into the twentieth century. In the 1950s and 1960s, for example, religious conservatives mounted a theological defense against the powerful ecumenical movement of mainline Protestantism, and began to stitch together a loose alliance that would make later political partnerships possible. As historians and other scholars continue to investigate the ‘long history’ of the Religious Right, many observers also wonder what the future holds in a secularizing United States. Here, then, are six predictions about the Religious Right in the years ahead:

1. The Religious Right is not going away, but predictions of its demise will continue.

No sooner had the Religious Right emerged than those from both inside and outside of the movement began forecasting its end. Religious Right leaders have often threatened to abandon politics should politicians and, particularly, the Republican Party ignore their agenda, but they continue to be the GOP’s most important constituency. Secular commentators, on the other hand, read almost every election result and demographic forecast as a death knell for the Religious Right. Religious conservatives and their organizations, however, are not going away. While the United States is becoming less Christian, most conservative Christian denominations remain vibrant and will continue to exert their influence in public life. Indeed, the sense of being a shrinking demographic will galvanize religious conservatives’ commitment to politics as a means of safeguarding their religious identity and defending ‘religious freedom’, the latest framework for the politics of the Religious Right.

2.The Religious Right will become more racially diverse, especially its leadership.

Changing demographics mean significant transformations for the nation’s politics. The Religious Right will not be immune from these shifts, but will instead reflect them. Historically, the Religious Right has included almost only white evangelicals, Catholics, and Mormons. But with the nation’s rising Hispanic population and the rapid growth of Asian-American evangelicals, plus an increasingly vocal and visible number of conservative African-American religious leaders, like Bishop Harry R. Jackson, Jr., the faces of the Religious Right will showcase the nation’s racial diversity. Many of these non-white Americans may never join the Republican Party, but their backing of socially conservative candidates and legislation will be critical for the Religious Right’s political victories going forward.

Image credit: Pray for our nation sign by Billy Hathorn. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

3. Mormons will play a more visible role in the Religious Right and national politics.

Since the 1970s, the LDS Church has played an active role in national politics, but much of that work has been under the radar. Working through grassroot organizations that often hid their LDS affiliation, Mormons helped defeat the Equal Rights Amendment, pass anti-gay legislation, and enact anti-obscenity laws, among other ‘moral issues’, as the church defined them. In 2008, however, the LDS Church prominently led efforts to pass California’s Proposition 8 ballot initiative outlawing same-sex marriage. Mitt Romney’s two presidential bids brought increased attention to the church and helped mainstream Mormonism to the American public. During the Obama presidency, the LDS Church has become one of the most outspoken and vigilant defenders of religious liberty, a move that has helped strengthen political ties with conservative Catholics and evangelicals. As evangelicals have softened, or at least reevaluated, some of their longstanding attitudes about Mormonism, they have also helped lay the groundwork for a much more visible and politically-active LDS Church.

4. Abortion will continue to be a top issue; same-sex marriage will not.

Although the federal right to abortion has been legal for more than forty years longer than the federal right for same-sex couples to marry, religious conservatives see abortion’s legality as far more vulnerable and will continue to seek to overturn it. On the other hand, they will generally accept marriage equality as ‘settled law’. The key difference here is the generational factor. Younger religious conservatives, including evangelicals, support same-sex marriage more than twice as much as the oldest generation. Conversely, younger religious conservatives are just as likely to oppose abortion rights as their elders. As public polling continues to indicate an almost equally divided nation on the question of abortion, these trends bode well for keeping abortion in the political spotlight and at the forefront of the Religious Right’s agenda.

5. The Religious Right will go local.

 Other than George W. Bush’s presidency, the Religious Right has had few political victories at the national level in the last twenty-five years. Locally, religious conservatives have fared far better in chipping away at abortion rights, implementing conservative educational curricula and textbooks, and (for a time) preventing same-sex marriage. This represents a concerted effort hatched in the 1990s by Christian Coalition president Ralph Reed who said he would “exchange the Presidency for 2,000 school board seats” so that he could transform the nation at the community level. Expect increased focus on local and state elections to advance religious conservatives’ causes in the years ahead.

6. The Religious Right will go global.

The Religious Right has also found incredible success on the international stage, particularly in Africa and South America. As Mormonism, Catholicism, and evangelicalism, particularly Pentecostalism, have grown on those continents, American religious conservatives have spotted fertile ground for their political objectives, such as the work of American evangelicals in supporting anti-gay measures in Uganda. There’s a feeling among some American religious leaders that the United States is a lost cause, but many of them believe certain foreign countries can defend and advance the political concerns of religious conservatism. Additionally, what will be most interesting to look for is whether conservative religious leaders from other countries, such as Brazil’s Silas Malafaia, who will have increasing relevance in the States thanks to changing demographic patterns, will involve themselves in American politics.

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The Angelina Jolie effect

It is hard to quantify the impact of ‘role-model’ celebrities on the acceptance and uptake of genetic testing and bio-literacy, but it is surely significant.

Angelina Jolie is an Oscar-winning actress, Brad Pitt’s other half, mother, humanitarian, and now a “DNA celebrity”. The highest paid actress in Hollywood has a BRCA gene associated with an 81% risk of inherited breast cancer. She opted for radical surgery, a double mastectomy, in a highly-publicized decision widely covered by the media. She described her experiences in a 2013 New York Times op-ed piece and followed it up with a diary of her surgery.

She propelled the topic of familial breast cancer, female prophylactic surgery, and DNA testing to the fore. Her A-list voice sang out loud and clear. There is still a long way to go, but individuals can have an impact.

Researchers have quantified how well she changed opinions and spread knowledge about genetic testing for breast cancer. Breast cancer killed Jolie’s mother, grandmother and aunt. In this era of ‘actionable genomics’, women in similar situations should be aware of their options. Called the “Angelina Jolie Effect”, her story doubled the number of women seeking genetic testing (NHS referrals) for inherited forms of breast cancer.

Popular TV shows like Who do you think you are? uncover details of family histories long after the traditional genealogical paper trail dries up with DNA-testing. They rely on participation by celebrities. The mainstreaming of “DNA stories” is intriguing and inspiring. This is not only gripping TV, but also a way to whet the appetite of the public. Certainly, this is what Ancestry.com is banking on as it sponsors the show. The company 23andMe are also behind the show Finding Your Roots.

The host of Finding Your Roots, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., wrote a book on the subject and titled it Finding Oprah’s Roots: Finding Yours. DNA testing is a particularly attractive option for those who have been orphaned or displaced from their line of ancestry, as in the case of those who are descended from slaves. Oprah Winfrey took a DNA test for the PBS show African American Lives and learned she is Kpelle (Liberia), Bamileke (Cameroon) and Bantu (Zambia).

Image: Angelina Jolie at Davos, World Economic Forum 2005, by Remy Steinegger. CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Tyra Banks had the contestants on her show America’s Next Top Model DNA tested. Curiosity motivated her to explore her roots and locate the genetic origins of her exotic good looks. She found she is 79% African, 18% British and 6% Native American.

When actress and singer Vanessa Williams ordered a kit from Ancestry.com her results were widely reported in the popular media (e.g. Huffington Post). Unusual in being an African-American with blue eyes, she is a wonderful genetic mix. She says these results have inspired her to travel more to explore her diverse heritage. Her profile suggests she is “23% from Ghana, 17% from the British Isles, 15% from Cameroon, 12% Finnish, 11% Southern European, 7% Togo, 6% Benin, 5% Senegal and 4% Portuguese”.

The chance to unearth evidence of celebrity DNA has always been part of the intrigue of ancestry research. We are elated to find we are related to the rich and famous, royalty or one of the world’s intellectual giants. Both men and women can compare mitochondrial lineages and men can check Y chromosome lineages against the growing list of historical figures who have been genotyped by the DNA testing of direct descendents. Perhaps you have the Y-haplogroup E-Z830 of Einstein or the C3 (M217) of Ghengis Khan or the mitochondrial haplogroup H of Marie Antoinette? There are even DNA-testing kits designed only to tell you if you share DNA with famous people.

Other celebs are shaping the landscape of genomics from within. Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google (Alphabet) has a genetic risk of Parkinson’s disease and as a result decided to take action. His wife’s company, 23andMe, did the test that identified his mutation, and through it they have launched what is now the world’s largest study of Parkinson’s families. Working with the Michael J. Fox Foundation, they built a cohort of DNA donors. While it is hoped the investment will pay off scientifically, it has certainly paid off financially. In early 2015, 23andMe sold this cohort data to GeneTech for $60 million.

Apple cofounder and CEO, Steve Jobs, helped jump start the personal genomics revolution. He was one of the first ever to have the genome of his cancer sequenced. The company that did the analysis, Foundation Medicine, is backed by Google and Gates, and is worth billions. Cancer sequencing starts at $5000 and Google is offering it as a perk to employees.

As genomics continues to seep into the mainstream, pioneering scientists are climbing the celebrity ladder. Considered an outside candidate for the world’s first trillionaire for his work reading and writing genomes, Craig Venter was the first individual to publish his own genome. Today he is the face of a luxury watch campaign by Jeager-LeCoultre.

The list of celebrity endorsements of DNA testing goes on and on, but in many ways, the new celebrity is DNA.

Featured image credit: Maleficent, by Joan Sebastian Araujo Arena. CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Flickr.

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Pathfinders

For a long time I have been dealing with the words bad, bed, bud, body, bodkin, butt, bottom, and their likes. The readers who have followed the discussion will probably guess from today’s title that now the time of path has come round. Few English words have been explored so often and in such detail as path, but scholars are nowhere near consensus on its origin despite the richness of the available material and the excellence of the research devoted to it. As usual, I’ll give very few references, for the entire list of the works used for this post can be found in my bibliography of English etymology. In the rare cases when someone wants to follow my sources, I send the questioner the text of the required article (many publications in the bibliography are hard to get, while I keep all of them in my office).

The original pathfinder

Path was doomed to give language historians trouble because the word is old and begins with p. This is a fatal combination. Since path was recorded in Old English and has cognates in German and Dutch, it could have been expected to go back to Indo-European antiquity. But the Germanic consonant p should, theoretically, correspond to non-Germanic b, just as t corresponds to d (compare English two and Latin duo). For the reason never clarified to everybody’s satisfaction, reconstructed Indo-European does not seem to have had b. Such gaps in the system are also known in living languages. Those of little phonological faith are always reminded that Modern Dutch has b and d but lacks g. Not everybody agrees that ancient Indo-European did entirely without b, but, in any case, it was very rare.

By contrast, p occurred regularly, and many words in Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, and Slavic that begin with p are semantically compatible with path. The conclusion suggests itself that path was borrowed from some other language. The most probable lender is Avestan pad, which means the same as path. (Avestan, or Zend—its older name—is a dead Iranian language related to Sanskrit.) Many etymologists believe that path is indeed a borrowing of Avestan pad. The idea that path goes back to Celtic has few supporters. We needn’t choose between the two sources. It is more important to decide whether path can under no circumstances be native.

First, something should be said about the distribution of Germanic path on the map of the world. As noted, it occurred in Old English. Its Modern German and Dutch cognates are Pfad and pad. Pfad is a bookish word and is almost unknown in southern dialects. Dutch pad corresponds to path and means “path, way.” From it we have pad “robber” (gentlemen of the pad, along with footpads, attacked and robbed people). In the scholarly literature, path is often called a West Germanic word. Yet a similar-sounding word (pada) occurs in some Swedish dialects in both Sweden and Finland. There it means “a piece of low ground” or “a small bay.” For this reason, Hans Jonsson, the author of a detailed book on the Scandinavian names for “body of water,” declared path ~ pad ~ Pfad and Scandinavian pada to be different words (homonyms), though he knew that one of the senses of Od Engl. pæþ (pronounced as path in American English) was “valley.” When one combines all the recorded senses of the West Germanic word, one comes up with “way; valley” and “swamp.” The Swedish forms fit this array quite well. I doubt that Swedish pada can be separated from its West Germanic look-alikes and will now ask: “How could such three meanings coexist in one noun?”

Paderborn on the river Pader.

Albrecht Greule, another distinguished student of hydronyms, concentrated on the river name Pader, known to many from the name of the town Paderborn in Westphalia. He looked at the root pat- ~ bat- and came to the familiar result that it meant “to swell.” In some older posts I mentioned this root more than once. It was isolated long ago, and numerous words, from Engl. puddle and pudding to pad “frog” and bud and button found themselves in this etymological orphanage. Whether the obscure English noun pod belongs here is anybody’s guess. “Swell” is a good meaning on which to base a river name, but “valley” and “path” look less promising.

I am returning to Wilhelm Oehl, whose ideas figured prominently in the post of 21 October. One of his articles deals with the word for “foot” in the languages of the world. From Bantu to English, sound groups like pita, bode, fat, feta, and their likes, all meaning either “foot” or “tread,” occur with astounding regularity. I’ll mention German Pfote “paw,” from pote; several Romance forms sound alike. Among many others, the non-Germanic congeners of Engl. foot are Latin ped– (as in pedestrian) and Greek pod– (as in podium). Old Icelandic yields more words of the same type (Oehl cited them). It is hard to deny the idea that we have before us a sound-imitating group. Hardly anyone will disagree that Engl. pit-a-pat is an onomatopoeic formation. Some time before Oehl (in the 1920s) Ferdinand Sommer came to the same conclusion, though his material is not so rich. Unfortunately, his article was published posthumously in 1977. Elmar Seebold, the editor of the latest editions of Kluge’s etymological dictionary of German, is aware of Sommer’s work, but he may not have read Oehl. He gives cautious references to Sommer in the entries Pfad and Pfote. Oehl’s results would have spared him the uncertainty.

In the past, I have noted more than once that the concept of homonymy is inapplicable to sound-imitative and sound symbolic words. Those are like imaginary numbers, which cannot be larger or smaller. It appears that all over the world people use the complexes pad ~ pat and bot ~ bud (with various vowels between them) to designate swelling and the same complexes to refer to treading and the foot, the organ of treading. Perhaps the river Pader “swells,” while valleys and swamps “expand.” Unlike those, paths were meant for padding along (compare the verb paddle “to walk through the mud”).

No easy path leads from Avestan to English.

This hypothesis does not make further research into the history of every individual word useless. Oehl’s tendency to offer only a bird’s-eye view of the material has its merits (the general picture becomes clear) and demerits (too many heterogeneous words are lumped together without discussion). German Pfote has unquestionable analogs in Romance, but we still don’t know whether Germanic borrowed the Romance noun or Romance borrowed it from Germanic, or whether both go back to a third language (some substrate), or, finally, whether the two language groups coined the words individually, that is, independently of each other. In my opinion, path and its Germanic cognates were not borrowed from Iranian. As Theodora Bynon pointed out, if the word had come to West Germanic from Avestan, it would have left some traces between England / the Netherlands and Iran, but despite her attempt to find the Celtic source of path, the phonetic difficulties are too serious to be ignored.

So a primitive local formation? A migratory word? Perhaps.

Image credits: (1) The Pathfinder by James Fenimore Cooper (Modern Library Edition) via Pat Iacuzzi Pinterest. (2) Fontes Paderae, seu Paderborn (1671). Monumenta Paderbornensia 2. Ausg. 1672, S. 168 UB Paderborn. Johann Georg Rudolphi, Romeyn de Hooghe. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. (3) Bodleian Library, MS J2 fol. 175. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Distinctive dress: Martial’s index to life in a crammed metropolis

His books are famous around the world, but their author struggles to get by – two themes that quickly become familiar to any reader. Martial has an eye for fabric. He habitually ranks himself and judges others by the price and quality of their clothing and accessories (e.g. 2.29, 2.57), a quick index in the face-to-face street life of the crammed metropolis. Compare 2.58, targeting an ex-slave who has risen in the world but incurred too many debts along the way:

Dressed in fine new wool, Zoilus, you poke fun at my worn old clothes. They may be worn, Zoilus, but at least I own them.

Zoilus’ name pegs him as a Greek intellectual hanger-on; the historic Zoilus was a proverbially severe critic of Homer. Martial’s shabby clothing declares his stubborn pride in his citizenship and rank: he may be poor compared to these parvenus but ‘I’m not a nobody. I’m a knight, of no mean reputation; indeed, I’m widely read around the world’ (5.13). His declared status as an eques (knight) places him in a small social and economic elite, as by implication does his expensive education. Protestations of poverty were a poetic cliché, and distinctions in clothing, as in food, were shorthand for a too-haughty patron: ‘you expect me to be your “best mate” when you’re in purple and I’m in an itchy blanket?’ (6.11)

Martial’s coats here are lacernae, a thick, military-style woollen cloak often worn with a hood against bad weather, such as the rainstorm of 3.100; originally a foreign import, they were a poor choice for formal occasions. In the country Romans can wear any old thing, comfortably and cheaply (4.66, 10.96, 12.18), but the duties of urban amicitia (friendship and the patron-client relationship) demand the heavy and high-maintenance toga – ‘Is this what I deserve, Fabianus, with my worn old toga that I’ve paid for myself?’ (3.36), ‘You extort from me no end of toga-work’ (3.46, cf. 2.53, 5.22).

Statue of a man in a toga. Photo by Carole Raddato, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Martial’s obliging friend Rufus appears often in his books – the index points to some examples. The poet is comically cheeky in continually asking for generous favours: at 7.36 he asks another benefactor, Stella, for a raincoat to follow up a gift of roof-tiles for his new country place (cf. 6.5) – ‘Stella, you clothe my farm, but not its farmer’.

How does the stranger recognise Martial? Probably word of mouth – he’s ‘that Martial’, ille Martialis, wording that recalls 1.1 (cf. 10.9), and any civilised person knows his text (Batavians were a Germanic tribe in what’s now the Netherlands and presumably proverbial for dull-wittedness; the Humanist Erasmus, himself a Batavian keen to shake off his roots and a keen reader of Martial, had this poem in mind when he dismissed his fellow-countrymen as clods). But it’s conceivable, in the Martialverse if not perhaps in real life, that he has seen a portrait of the poet: two of his Avid Fans had such a portrait painted (7.84, 9 preface), and prestige editions of literary classics could be prefaced with a portrait of their author (Doggy-Bags 186, perhaps drawn from a bust of Virgil).

 

Image Credit: Roman Temple, Creative Commons Licence via Pixabay

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Clean air… hot air

With elections just about a year away, Americans can expect to hear a lot about regulation during the next twelve months—most of it from Republicans and most of it scathing.

Republican frontrunner Donald Trump typifies the GOP’s attitude toward regulation. At the conclusion of a speech on 14 September in Dallas, he said: “We’re going to get rid of all these ridiculous – everything is so bad – we’re going to get rid of the regulations that are just destroying us. You can’t breathe. You cannot breathe.”

Given the rambling nature of Trump’s speech it is difficult to know exactly what he was talking about, but the mention of breathing may have been a reference to regulations imposed by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which has a mandate to establish and enforce regulations aimed at reducing air pollution, as well as protecting land and water resources.

Trump is not alone: the EPA is among the Republicans’ least favorite agencies. Presidential candidates Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio all call for cutting back on the EPA’s influence. During the 2014 election, candidate —now Senator — Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) advocated abolishing the Environmental Protection Agency altogether. And Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK), chairman of the Senate’s Climate and Public Works Committee, whose skepticism of the overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change knows no bounds, is quoted as having compared the EPA to a “Gestapo Bureaucracy.”

Republican-leaning business groups like the US Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers, and the American Legislative Exchange Council all carp about the cost of EPA regulations on American business.

Do these regulations, in fact, impose a cost on business? Of course, they do. But that is only half of the story.

Image credit: Flag of the United States Environmental Protection Agency by Fry1989. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Suppose you own a company that manufactures Jeb Bush barbecue aprons — a steal at $30 (and made in the USA!). Your company is very profitable. Consider the following fictional example. Let’s assume that for every $1000 worth of aprons you sell, you earn $100 profit; however, the manufacturing process is environmentally unfriendly — manufacturing $1000 worth of aprons spews 100 pounds of pollution into the atmosphere. The pollution is a byproduct of apron production, something economists call an ‘externality.’ Since the $100 profit is yours and yours alone, but the air pollution is shared with everyone in the neighborhood of your factory, you have an incentive to continue to pollute.

And so you do…until the EPA comes along and writes a regulation prohibiting you from belching pollution into the atmosphere. Your dismay is understandable— you have been making barbecue aprons for years and all of a sudden the government is robbing you of your hard-earned $100 profit. Your bottom line takes a hit (you cannot switch production into Carly Fiorina necklace flasks — only $22.50 — because they are imported). And opponents like the US Chamber of Congress increases their estimate of the crushing burden of federal environmental regulation by $100 and argues even more forcefully that environmental regulation is destroying American business.

But the above calculation of the regulation’s costs ignores its benefits. If 100 pounds of pollution causes $250 in damage to the economy (for example, from environmental damage and future health care costs arising from the increased incidence of lung diseases), restricting the polluting activity will make the economy as a whole better off, since society’s gain — in terms of improved health and environmental quality — exceeds your firm’s loss by $150.

Writing regulations that generate net societal gain is the object of administrations, both Democratic and Republican. In his 2007 Report to Congress on the Benefits and Costs of Federal Regulations and Unfunded Mandates on State, Local, and Tribal Entities, President George W. Bush— not known as the most environmentally friendly president— estimated that 39 EPA rules written between 1996 and 2006 cost between $39 and $46 billion, but brought benefits of between $98 and $484 billion. In other words, the benefits of these regulations were between 2 and 12 times the costs. President Obama’s 2014 edition of that report, considering 34 EPA rules introduced between 2003 and 2013, estimated that benefit-to-cost ratios were nearly twice as high, with benefits between 4 and 24 times costs.

It is, of course, reasonable to argue about the fine points of these calculations. However, the cost-benefit analysis of both Bush and Obama EPA regulations is so clearly on the side of benefits to society, it is reasonable to conclude that Republicans are more worried about the impact of environmental regulations on their friends in industry than about their benefits for the rest of us.

I wonder if the Marco Rubio 100% organic cotton made in the USA baby bib (only $15) is environmentally friendly.

Featured image credit: UN Climate Talks 2010. Cancun, Mexico, 2010 (United Nations) by UN Climate Talks. CC-BY-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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