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10 questions for Raúl Esparza

Each summer, Oxford University Press USA and Bryant Park in New York City partner for their summer reading series Word for Word Book Club. The Bryant Park Reading Room offers free copies of book club selections while supply lasts, compliments of Oxford University Press, and guest speakers lead the group in discussion. On Tuesday 16 July 2013, actor Raúl Esparza leads a discussion on The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas.

What was your inspiration for this book? (Choosing The Count of Monte Cristo for the book club discussion).

This is the first book I remember my father giving me to read. It was, he said, his favorite book growing up. It’s an easy read. I was a boy in middle school. I fell in love with the world and the drama of it. I used to act out the story. It’s a swashbuckler so it appealed to the tree-climbing dreamer in me, living close to the beach in Miami, imagining my own treasure islands and daring escapes and intricate 10 year old revenges. I also had a Spanish teacher who used to insist that we learn to be on time like the Count of Monte Cristo; this is a harder task for a Cuban boy than it would seem to be on the surface, but the idea of arriving melodramatically as the last b ell tolls the exact hour always appealed to me in theory.

I’ve read this book over and over in my life. As a boy. As a teenager. In my 20s and 30s. It changes, like all great writing, depending on when you come to the novel. It’s not an adventure story to me anymore. It is in reality a much darker kind of epic, dripping blood and acid and regret. But, of course, as a child, I had no idea this was the core of the novel all along.

And so the book lives as two experiences at once for me: first, as an inspiration for a boy to become an extraordinary man, perhaps someone who dreams of transforming himself constantly, as I have chosen to do in my life professionally, and then also, as a warning that the bitterness we hold onto in our lives and the fantasy of revenge that we all engage in at some point whenever we are deeply and truly hurt will always transform us, mold us into something, perhaps, that we do not wish to be, change us fundamentally in a dangerous ricochet we may not even notice until we have failed to live today because we have wasted all our life mourning what we used to have yesterday.

Where do you do your best writing?

At the top of mountains at the end of hiking trails next to waterfalls in the Rockies, and in the corners of old theaters annotating scripts and making up lives for characters I’m playing during breaks from rehearsal. Though that’s not really a question for me, is it?

Which author do you wish had been your 7th grade English teacher?

Anne Lamott cause she’s honestly funny and heartbreakingly honest and I think she would be a teacher who would make English such a cool, wild, inspiring class to attend. That Spanish teacher I mentioned earlier, Beatriz Jimenez, I had her from 7th grade to 11th; she was one of those.

What is your secret talent?

I can sing pretty well.

What is your favorite book?

The Waves by Virginia Woolf though I don’t think she would have been a fun teacher at all, and I couldn’t possibly ask anyone to come discuss this painful masterpiece for an hour under the trees in a park. We’d never get past the first ten pages, or we’d sit around midtown in a deep existential funk.

Do you prefer writing on a computer or longhand?

Longhand. Writing on a computer is too cold. Pen in hand, unedited and uncensored, is a better way to get the heart of things, I think, and go past what you expected to create, especially when riffing about ideas for a performance or engaging in the kind of Rorschach test needed to fill in the spaces a great playwright leaves for an actor to climb into, but you don’t care about that do you?

What book are you currently reading? (Old school or e-Reader?)

I read too many books at once. For today:

Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner (old school)

Wild by Cheryl Strayed (iPad, wish I’d bought the hard copy)

Religion for Atheists by Alain de Boton (old school)

 What word or punctuation mark are you most guilty of overusing?

; [The semicolon]

If you weren’t a writer, what would you be?

If I weren’t an actor, I might just be a writer. (I had figured I’d be a lawyer, but I’m not. I just play one on TV.)

Raúl E. Esparza is a four-time Tony Award nominee in every acting category. He currently plays the roles of A.D.A. Barba on Law & Order: SVU and Dr. Frederick Chilton on Hannibal.  He has played recurring roles on A Gifted Man and Pushing Daisies, and guest starred on 666 Park Avenue, Medium, Law & Order: CI, and Law & Order. Film credits include Sidney Lumet’s Find Me Guilty and Wes Craven’s My Soul to Take. On Broadway, he has appeared in Leap of Faith, Arcadia, Speed-the-Plow, The Homecoming, Company, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Taboo, Cabaret, and The Rocky Horror Show. Other notable stage credits include the 2002 Kennedy Center Sondheim Celebration: Sunday in the Park with George and Merrily We Roll Along, Shakespeare in the Park’s Twelfth Night, ENCORES Anyone Can Whistle, and Off-Broadway in The Normal Heart, Comedians and tick, tick… BOOM!. He is the recipient of the OBIE, the New York Outer Critics Award, the Barrymore, the LA Ovation Award, the Jose Ferrer Award and three Drama Desk Awards.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook. Read previous interviews with Word for Word Book Club guest speakers.

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Stereotypes and realities in Catholicism

By Peter McDonough

Writing about Catholicism started out as a sideline for me. Most of my research as a political scientist was about the breakup of authoritarian regimes in places like Brazil and Spain.

Then, in what indulgent colleagues called “Peter’s midlife crisis,” I began inquiring into changes in the Catholic church. Soon a book was published about the American Jesuits during the years leading up to, and immediately following, Vatican II. Later, another one came out comparing Jesuits and former Jesuits. Ten years after that, I finished a book about the emergence of reform groups in the American church. In hindsight, the books form a trilogy, following a kind of arc. The first focuses on priests, the second on priests and ex-priests, and the third on lay people.

So, with decreasingly frequent excursions into political science, my commitment to academic convention became something of a sidebar itself. The process, which began in the early 1980s, unfolded across three decades.

As an amateur in the field, I quickly came across a couple of stereotypes that, for all my efforts to disprove them, have turned out (with some tweaking) to be true. One is the notion that the Catholic church is obsessed with sex. The second is that Catholics take less of an active role in church affairs than their counterparts from other denominations.

The fixation-with-sex business comes in several parts. What makes Catholicism nearly distinctive among the major Western religions is the close connection between authority and gender. Males rule. Women are second-class disciples. Demonstrating that the arrangement is dysfunctional is incidental to a conviction that, were women to be admitted into the upper reaches of power, the institutional hierarchy would fall apart.

A variation on this theme is the permanence of a male-female polarity. Sexual identities are binary and fixed. The ideal of an “androgynous Christ” gained prominence in Catholic spiritual thinking during recent years, especially among priests searching for ways to be “all things to all men.” But sexual fluidity, the practice of homosexuality, and the like are definite no-nos.

The reason behind both these rigid perspectives is that traditional sexual standards represent a belief in a universal moral code, immune to local and historical variations. They form a bulwark against relativism. They are the foundations of what used to be called The Great Chain of Being, a religious concept denoting a strict, hierarchical order for all matter and life. They partake of what is still called, in some quarters, the natural law. None of this is altogether peculiar to Catholicism, as the mindset appears in other Abrahamic religions. But it attains a particularly fierce intensity in the church.

At this point we need to introduce an important “yes, but.” The code as outlined is prescribed by the church but less and less adhered to by Catholics themselves. It carries more weight among the old, and among swathes of new immigrants, than other sectors of the faithful who differ little from their non-Catholic peers in matters of contraception, divorce, and so on. Nevertheless, the inherited code is not a mere formality. The fear is that undoing it would result in the collapse of the Catholic enterprise, just as mainstream Protestant denominations have lost members apparently in direct proportion to their liberalizing ventures.

As for the Catholic deficit in participation, I started out with the hunch that this, too, was an urban legend. But it isn’t. While the data could be more abundant, such studies that exist on the subject converge on the fact that Catholics tend to be generally less engaged in their parishes than Protestants are in their congregations. They also tend to donate less money to their church.

Why is this the case? It is not as if participation has held up across non-Catholic denominations while shrinkage has been confined to Catholics. On the contrary, like non-religious voluntary associations everywhere, many religious groups have lost membership and enthusiasm.

As far as we can tell, the participatory lag of Catholics lies in the fact that they started at a lower baseline before the general downturn in social capital. Catholics are accustomed to hierarchy within the church. The habit is part of their culture. Parishes are not “congregations,” with all the schools-of-democracy resonance that term entails. Even if some of them are reluctant to defend deference as a matter of principle, the faithful have other things to worry about. Polling regularly shows that more consultative designs for church life are increasingly popular among Catholics. But this has not prompted a groundswell of reform movements.

Again, the data could be better. There seems to be no connection between submissiveness inside the church, for example, and the rates of participation that Catholics show in politics, business, and other secular activities. It is not as if Catholics carry their relative passivity inside the church over to outside spheres. This compartmentalization, if that’s what it is, remains a bit of a puzzle.

The greater puzzle is whether we are anywhere near a tipping point with regard to adherence to hierarchy and sexuality in Catholicism. The culture of the church is still reminiscent of those dark Victorian interiors, cool and slightly damp, the heavy drapes drawn to protect the furnishings, the tapestries, the carpets, the ancestral paintings. The lace curtains are scrupulously clean. The people themselves, especially the women, look a little pale, as they are supposed to, in homage to a civilization that prized a certain pallor as a sign of non-exposure to work outside in the sun.

Peter McDonough has written two books on the Jesuits and others on democratization in Brazil and Spain. His most recent book is The Catholic Labyrinth: Power, Apathy, and a Passion for Reform in the American Church. He lives in Glendale, California. Read his previous blog post: “Creativity in the social sciences.”

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Image credit: Blessing. Stained glass in Catholic church in Dublin showing a priest giving his blessing. The stained-glass windows are by the famous artist, William Early, who died during the commission. © junak via iStockphoto.

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A Who’s Who quiz for the British summer

By Katie Raymond

Britons know that when the sun shines you need to take advantage of it. With so many fantastic events spanning the summer months, there are plenty of reasons to celebrate the British summertime. Come rain or shine, we present a Who’s Who quiz of British summer events sure to keep your summer bright.

What makes the British summer so special? Let’s start off on a “high note” with Glyndebourne Opera Festival. The 2013 season celebrates three major composers who are intrinsically linked with Glyndebourne’s history: Verdi, Britten, and Wagner. Then it’s a gentle trot north-west to take in the milliners’ favourite event of the summer, Royal Ascot. The event takes place the third week in June in the small town of Ascot, Berkshire. This year’s prestigious Gold Cup went to HM the Queen. If you can throw a tennis ball 33 miles then it could end up at Wimbledon, our next destination. Wimbledon hosted over 480,000 in attendance in 2012, with a peak audience of 16.9m tuning in to watch last year’s championship game between Andy Murray and Roger Federer. Then it’s a short drive to Silverstone for the British Grand Prix for our next pit stop. 120,000 fans filled the one-time airfield to see British drivers like Jenson Button compete in one of the summer’s best events.

First held in 1839, the Henley Royal Regatta is the best known regatta in the world and the next stop on our Who’s Who quiz. The race earned the royal status in 1851 when Prince Albert became its first royal patron. Next up it’s The Ashes, a cricket series that began in 1882 and is played alternately in England and Australia. This legendary series has featured some of the greatest cricketers of all time, such as England’s Jack Hobbs.  Then, head to London to admire the BBC Proms, which run from July to September at London’s Royal Albert Hall. The summer spectacular culminates in Hyde Park for Proms in the Park. This year’s finale event will be presented by Sir Terry Wogan with British pop legend Bryan Ferry leading the entertainment. Penultimately, The British Open, which takes place the third weekend in July, is the only major held outside of the United States on one of nine links courses in Scotland or England. Ernie Els will be defending his title at Muirfield this summer. The last destination and challenge in our Who’s Who quiz is the Edinburgh Fringe Festival where playwrights and national treasures such as Alan Bennett got their big breaks.

And now for the whistle-stop tour of the British summer designed to inform and amuse you in equal measure. Have you got what it takes to be the Who’s Who“top banana” (or should I say strawberry)? Take the quiz to find out…

Get Started!




Your Score:  
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Katie Raymond is an editorial assistant in the reference department of Oxford University Press.

Who’s Who is the essential directory of the noteworthy and influential in every area of public life, published worldwide, and written by the entrants themselves. Who’s Who 2013 includes autobiographical information on over 34,000 influential people from all walks of life. You can browse by people, education, and even recreation. The 165th edition includes a foreword by Arianna Huffington on ways technology is rapidly transforming the media. Please note that the Who’s Who articles in this blog post will be freely accessible until the 20th June 2013, after which you can access through a subscription. You can follow Who’s Who on Twitter @ukwhoswho.

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Image credit: Photo of Henley Royal Regatta, 1890s. Image courtesy of United States’ Library of Congress via WikiCommons.

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The coming of age of international criminal justice

By Julia Geneuss and Florian Jessberger

Fifteen years ago, on 17 July 1998, the Rome Statute, the founding treaty of the International Criminal Court (ICC), was adopted, creating the first permanent international forum to try and punish perpetrators of mass atrocities. The anniversary of the adoption of the Rome Statute was chosen as World Day for International Justice — a ‘holiday’ to celebrate not only the ICC, but the whole emerging system of international criminal justice. This year the Rome Statute celebrates its fifteenth birthday, its Quinceañera. A good opportunity for a few thoughts on past, present and future of international criminal justice.

Past: Success

The emergence of an international system of criminal justice is indeed worth celebrating. It represents one of the few bright spots in the recent history of international law. In the last decade of the 20th century we experienced phenomenal progress in individual criminal accountability for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, with, inter alia, the establishment of the ad hoc Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the proceedings for human rights violations, in particular torture, against Chilean General Augusto Pinochet in Spain and the United Kingdom, the establishment of the International Criminal Court, and the implementation of international core crimes into many national legal orders.

Present: Pressure

These days, however, international criminal justice is going through tough times. Fifteen years after the adoption of the Rome Statute and ten years after the idea of a permanent international criminal court switched from being a utopian dream to becoming reality it is difficult to deny that the ‘project’ of international criminal justice is increasingly coming under pressure. The euphoric mood that, only a few years ago, swept through the international and academic community as well as the general public has faded. Optimism has slowly turned into disillusionment. Arguably, the momentum for international criminal law has disappeared.

Several recent incidents, when considered together, support this hypothesis. At the international level, the performance of the ICC is met with growing disbelief. States parties have become more and more impatient with a Court that needed ten years to render its first judgment. Despite a growing number of investigations, prosecutions, trials and appeals they pushed for a zero-growth budget — in times of weak economy and financial crisis international criminal law does not seem to be too high on the states’ priority lists. Also, the ICC, first and foremost the Court’s Office of the Prosecutor, is heavily criticized for its allegedly selective prosecutorial strategy, its focus on Africa, culminating in severe tension between the Court and the African Union. Finally, these days it is more apparent than ever that ICC still is torn between universal aspiration and traditional sovereignty, between criminal law and international law, between common law and civil law traditions, between human rights enforcement and careful observance of fair trial standards, and, last but by no means least, between law and politics. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, on the other hand, has received a lot of criticism for its recent acquittals of high-ranking military generals. The decisions were cause for deep concerns — both outside and apparently also inside the Court, culminating in allegations that the decisions were based on purely political rather than legal reasons. As a consequence, many observers feel that the Tribunal is well on the way to lose the rather good reputation it gained during the last decade and discredits itself at the final stretch before it will be closed down for good.

International criminal law enforcement also faces a backlash at the national level: Belgium and Spain significantly cut back their laws on universal jurisdiction, thus no longer being able to prosecute international crimes that have no direct connection to their territory or citizens. Judge Baltasar Garzón, the judge who initiated the proceedings against Pinochet in the mid-1990ies and one of the most visible protagonists of a forceful system of international criminal justice, has been swept out of the way. In several countries, such as Germany, the laws on international crimes which were ambitiously implemented during the heyday of international criminal justice have hardly been applied. And finally, in a closely related matter, the US Supreme Court recently sent a powerful message against civil universal jurisdiction with its unanimous decision in Kiobel, the majority of judges arguing for a ‘presumption against extraterritoriality’ in human rights litigation under the Alien Tort Statute.

Future: Open

These are just but a few fervently discussed “setbacks” for international criminal justice. These events and their possible impact on the overall fate of the international criminal justice project are important to analyze. Is this the not so happy end of the success story of international criminal justice? Or is international criminal justice simply being brought down-to-earth requiring an adjustment of our excessive expectations? In a symposium “Down the Drain or Down to Earth: International Criminal Justice under Pressure” we edited for the recent issue of the Journal of International Criminal Justice a number of eminent scholars present their views on these questions and put things into perspective.

Reading through the thought-provoking essays a number of common findings can be observed. First of all, most authors emphasize the relativity of success and failure: The assessment of the overall development of the international criminal justice project depends on the proper context and temporal baseline one chooses for comparison. If compared with the situation ten years ago, it must be acknowledged that international criminal law today is in a state of decline. Twenty years ago, however, today’s existing architecture of international justice seemed to be not more than a utopian dream of a few scholars.

Second, while most authors agree that the ICC’s performance is rather unsatisfactory, they simultaneously highlight the regained importance of national jurisdictions within the global system of international criminal justice. With international criminal law infiltrating the legal systems of many states, the principle of complementarity, which stipulates the only subsidiary competence of the ICC vis-à-vis national jurisdictions, comes to be seen as one of the most important features of the ICC Statute. This way, the prosecution of international crimes finds its way back to where it arguably belongs: before national courts of the affected states.

Ultimately, despite all well-justified criticism of particular events, the authors seem to concur that recent developments generally indicate normalization rather than structural decline. We tend to agree with this analysis. The establishment of a system of international criminal justice has been an ambitious, revolutionary project. As in any revolution, hopes have been high, probably too high. Maybe we are all just coming to terms with the simple truth that international criminal justice in action is not an ideal in itself. Rather, it is complicated, costly, and exhausting — both in a literal and a figurative sense. Time has come for more modest, more realistic expectations.

Dr. Julia Geneuss LL.M. (NYU) is Senior Research Fellow and Lecturer at the University of Hamburg. She is a member of the Editorial Committee of the Journal of International Criminal Justice. Prof. Dr. Florian Jessberger is Professor of domestic and international criminal law and procedure at the University of Hamburg. He is member of the Board of Editors of the Journal of International Criminal Justice.

The Journal of International Criminal Justice aims to promote a profound collective reflection on the new problems facing international law. Established by a group of distinguished criminal lawyers and international lawyers, the journal addresses the major problems of justice from the angle of law, jurisprudence, criminology, penal philosophy, and the history of international judicial institutions. The recent issue of focuses on the many difficulties facing international criminal justice today, and David Luban’s and Bill Schabas’ papers are freely available for a limited time.

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Image credit: International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, Holland. © thehague via iStockphoto.

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Palliative care: who cares?

By Catherine Proot and Michael Yorke

With recent events relating to the Care Quality Commission (CQC) in the spotlight, and a stream of NHS scandals in the news, it might seem like an appropriate time to ask ‘who cares?’ It is easy to be negative, and the recent management issues and financial challenges within the NHS are disturbing. Ensuring that the Health Service remains free at the point of delivery has brought increasing pressures, so patients who are at the receiving end of the scandals rightly wonder ‘who cares?’

An alternative answer is demonstrated by the fact that upwards of one million people in the UK care faithfully and discretely for a very sick spouse or partner, relative, or friend, and generally in their own home. In addition, there are many professionals in different disciplines and many thousands more who assist as volunteers. The major health institutions will provide the basic supportive services required, but considering that receiving home palliative care doubles the odds of dying at home (Gomes et al, 2013), the role of the home or professional carer is in no way diminished. It is a huge response to an urgent and increasing need which brings with it challenges, both organisational and personal.

The nursing at home of someone with a major illness like a stroke, cancer, or one of the neurological diseases can be particularly stressful. Normal life as previously experienced is tipped upside down. Whatever the circumstance, life for both patient and carer will never be the same again. It is not only the immediate and practical care of the patient that can be exhausting; it is also the psychological response to those age-old questions about mortality, about worthiness for the role, about the future and regrets about past events that cannot be changed. There are so many things, kept suitably or conveniently in the subconscious, which in the new circumstances invade the senses where hordes of other questions have already taken up residence.

The practical challenges, for many people so much more obvious and applicable, cannot be overlooked. Perhaps the patient or carer has had to give up their job with consequential loss of earnings which comes at a time when costs rise for heating the home, paying for some domestic help, or using taxis when the driver of the family is also the patient.

Relationships with the professionals who come to the house must be accepted, maintained, and appreciated for the common good of patient and carer. They will all bring their own expertise to support the love and faithfulness of the home carer. Some people see these visitors as intrusive and invasive of their territory and privacy. This is a sad response, and detrimental to the whole household.

Considering our ageing population, some people called to be a carer are elderly themselves and have their own health problems which can complicate their task greatly. Prof Mayur Lakhani, Chair of Dying Matters Coalition, warns “As the number of people over the age of 85 is set to double over the next 20 years, the UK needs a new focus on health, well-being, housing, care and support for this emerging cohort.”

The palliative care movement has made great progress in dealing with patients as individual people, developing empathy between patient and carer and reducing pain and distress as much as possible. In spite of wide publicity and backing by the leadership of the health services, less than half of the critically ill in the UK are cared for according to these standards. This factor inevitably puts extra strain on family carers as they cope with patients who might be more distressed than is absolutely necessary.

Who cares? When the chips are down, most people do, but they are likely to need support and encouragement. The challenge is to make the palliative care skills and support more widely available in the family home, where the majority of people prefer to be cared for and die. It could be said that caring for a dying person is not a single person’s job, even if it is the most important and honourable one that that person might ever do.

Catherine Proot, Psychological Specialist in Palliative Care and Bereavement Coordinator, St Nicholas Hospice, Bury St Edmunds, UK, and Michael Yorke, Retired Priest and Vice Chairman, The Norfolk Hospice, UK are both editors of Life to be lived: Challenges and choices for patients and carers in life-threatening illnesses, out October 2013.

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Image credit: Autumn in Nymphenburg via iStockPhoto.

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In the buff: a classical view of National Nude Day

By Dimitris Plantzos

Skopas (?attrib.): grave stele of a young hunter, marble, h. 1.68 m, found near the Ilissos River, Athens, Late Classical period, c. 340–c. 330 BC (Athens, National Archaeological Museum); photo © Allan T. Kohl/AICT.

We can’t think of classical Greece without its nude statues, but what was it about nudity that made Greece classical? Thucydides was convinced that taking your kit off while exercising was a sign of cultural progress; he attributed the origins of the habit to the Spartans, and he disparaged the barbarians of his own day for still insisting on covering their genitals in public. For the Greeks nudity was an achievement of civilization: in art, as in life, you were showing off not what nature had provided but what your own (and your community’s) technologies of the self allowed you to make of nature’s endowment. Excellence in warfare and sports was what made you a Greek (a Greek man to be more precise), and it was nudity in the gymnasium and the training field — though not in the battleground as one would think — that taught you how to achieve this very much elusive Greekness. Hence Greek art seems familiar to us, its modern enthusiasts, even though, if you think about it, it can be as excruciatingly elitist today as it was back then: you are asked to respect and admire those nude bodies not only for what they achieved but mostly for what you could not possibly have pulled off (as it were). Still, classical nudity has enforced itself onto us as a universal symbol of humanity — of the human body’s power, prowess and beauty; of man’s (even woman’s) ability to conquer immortality, yet through something as fragile and ephemeral as the body of a youth.

Universal? Not quite. As recently as last April, authorities of an Olympic-themed exhibition at Doha, in Qatar, decided to cover two nude male statues on loan from Greece behind black screens. When the Greek Minister for Culture expressed his irritation, he was sent packing and the two nudes were, quite unceremoniously, sent back with him. As a Qatari commissary stated, “the decision to remove the objects was based on the flow of the exhibition, awareness of the outreach to all schools and families in Qatar, and desire to be sensitive to community needs and standards.” I don’t know exactly what kind of thoughts passed through the Greek minister’s head when he heard this explanation; I’m sure Thucydides would be seriously annoyed, however, and all for the wrong reasons. That a Qatari would presume to teach a Greek about “exhibition flows” is certainly adding insult to the blow of covering the statues; modern Greeks seem to believe that only they know what a museum is and what it is supposed to do, let alone how to do it. As for “sensitivity to community needs and standards,” could it be that those barbarians might resent Thucydides’ cultural model after all? What is about depictions of naked youths that a present-day community might find insensitive to its needs and standards?

Bryaxis (attrib.): Amazonomachy, marble, relief slab perhaps from a frieze, Late Classical period, mid-4th century BC (Athens, National Archaeological Museum); photo © Allan T. Kohl/AICT.

Religion is only the easy answer to this question and as such it cannot help us fathom the problem. Undoubtedly, a certain amount of hypocrisy seems to be at play here, as many of the 600 artefacts included in the Doha exhibition – supposed to work as a “bridge of friendship” between the two nations – showed bare-breasted women, yet the Qataris were happy to expose their schools and families to them. Still, it’s their museum, their rules. What I do find strange, however, is that Greece and the West at large insist on treating classical statuary as a true expression of their modern self. For classical nude had very little to do with aesthetics – it’s all social politics and I’m not quite sure we would be willing to subscribe to that in our societies. Greek nudity was invented in order to enforce specific social hierarchies — who, when and how is allowed or even able to do certain things – and, more to the point, to deploy strict gender asymmetries: only men were thought by Aristotle to possess the right body heat; women were thought of as mentally and bodily imbalanced creatures, therefore inferior to men. Male nudity, as a result, is the expression of an idealized, immortal self; female nudity, on the other hand, is a sign of weakness, vulnerability, and immorality (think of all those shy Aphrodites or debauched hetaerae lurking by the thousands in our museums). A slave could never become immortalized as a kouros, and heavy peploi and chitons made sure female bodies were kept in their proper place in art as in life. In a sense, what made Greece classical is what, in fact, ought to make us think twice before accepting the nude as an ideal form of human expression. Or is it that our needs and standards remain so much attached to those of ancient Greece that we can’t quite grasp the difference?

Dimitris Plantzos is a classical archaeologist, educated at Athens and Lincoln College, Oxford. His research focuses primarily on Greek art, archaeological theory, and modern receptions of classical antiquity. His publications include: Hellenistic Engraved Gems (OUP 1999); the Greek-language textbook Greek Art and Archaeology (Kapon 2011); and the edited volumes A Singular Antiquity: Archaeology and Hellenic Identity in 20th-c. Greece (Benaki 2008; with D. Damaskos) and A Companion to Greek Art (Wiley-Blackwell 2012; with T.J. Smith). He teaches classical archaeology at the Department of History and Archaeology, University of Athens and is co-director of the Argos Orestikon Excavation (Kastoria, Greece).

Oxford Art Online offers access to the most authoritative, inclusive, and easily searchable online art resources available today. Through a single, elegant gateway users can access — and simultaneously cross-search — an expanding range of Oxford’s acclaimed art reference works: Grove Art Online, the Benezit Dictionary of Artists, the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, The Oxford Companion to Western Art, and The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms, as well as many specially commissioned articles and bibliographies available exclusively online.

National Nude Day is an unofficial holiday observed on July 14. Caution is recommended when celebrating this festive occasion.

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Le 14 juillet

By Sanja Perovic

Le 14 juillet, as Bastille Day is known in France, is the only national festival that commemorates the French Revolution. According to revolutionary gospel, it marks the day when the ‘people’ stormed the state prison that once stood on today’s Place de la Bastille, thereby heralding the end of despotism and an era of freedom.  Today it seems like an obvious celebration. France was the European nation that underwent a Great Revolution and the fall of the Bastille is the iconic marker of that event.  But commemoration has not always been so straightforward. From 1813-1846 the statue of a giant elephant occupied the site of the former prison. In 1793, a fountain in the shape of bare-breasted Egyptian goddess was temporarily erected on the site (deputies of the Convention were encouraged to drink at her breasts in a symbol of national regeneration). The July column we see today commemorates not the fall of the Bastille but the Three Glorious Days of July 1830, when Charles X was deposed. It was not until the Third Republic that the storming of the Bastille was consolidated as the national celebration par excellence. And it was not given the full support of the French population, in particular the French Left, until after the fall of Vichy.

Elephant de la Bastille aquarelle de Jean Alavoine. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

If Bastille Day is an ‘invented tradition’ so too is the lore surrounding the old prison. The black legend of a state prison constructed from endless cells, torture chambers and infamous oubliettes – dungeons with trapdoors on the ceiling where people were left to die — circulated widely throughout the eighteenth century. Yet by the time of its taking the Bastille had less than seven inmates, all of them kept in style. Its most famous inmate, the Marquis de Sade, (removed a few days prior to the storming for inciting the crowds) kept an extensive wine collection in a purpose-build cellar. A previous inmate, a writer named Beaumelle, had a bespoke bookcase, constructed to house his personal library of over 600 volumes. By the second half of the eighteenth century, a stay in the Bastille or one of the other state prisons had almost become a rite of passage, as Diderot, Voltaire, Mirabeau and countless other writers passed through.  The image of virtuous innocence persecuted by a ‘despotic state’ was kept alive in the various media campaigns waged by the philosophes even though some, like Mirabeau and Sade, had been imprisoned at the behest of their own families.

The same ‘media-effect’ characterized the actual events of 14 July 1789. The day began when rumours of an impending occupation of the capital by royal troops led journalists such as Camille Desmoulins to demand the return of gunpowder and arms that had been moved into the Bastille for safe-keeping. It ended with the liberation of the Bastille and the transformation of this gothic symbol into space of freedom, as a jubilant ‘people’ ‘danced upon its ruins’.

But what does it mean to take the destruction of this monument as the beginning of a ‘new era’?  Why choose 14 July as the beginning of a new national tradition and not 20 June 1789, when the Tennis Court Oath had been proclaimed, or 4 August, when the nobility and the clergy voluntarily gave up their feudal privileges?  How did 14 July 1789 get established as a new ‘zero hour’ when the Revolution’s own ‘official Year I’ marked September 22 1792, when the French Republic was declared, as the new beginning?  And what about the deposition of the king on 10 August 1792 hailed in the media as the beginning of Year I of Equality?

As this profusion of potential ‘Year I’s’ make clear, orientation in time, particularly the chronological time of history, remained a challenge throughout the years of the French Revolution. 14 July 1789 eventually prevailed partly because it was an event without heroes (therefore easier to associate with the concept of a ‘sovereign people’) and partly because it allowed the rather embarrassing proliferation of other beginnings to be forgotten. The fact that it took over 150 years for le 14 juillet to be celebrated as the Revolution’s ‘origin’ speaks volumes about how foundational events are validated as such after the fact. It also demonstrates the curious bipolarity of this and other anniversary dates. For many years what made 14 July palatable as a celebration was its coincidence with the Festival of the Federation celebrated a year later, which marked not rupture and the overturning of the despotic state but a final rapprochement between the French nation and their king. Wordsworth famously described 14 July 1790 as the day when the ‘joy of one is joy for tens of millions’, while Michelet likened it to a quasi-mythological ‘collapse of geographical space’. Yet what remains in popular memory is not the (highly scripted) moment of reconciliation but the spontaneous event of the year before. As Charles Péguy noted, the storming of the Bastille was a festival even before it came to be celebrated as such. This is what it means to be a founding event. All foundational events are dated according to an impossible chronology, what Péguy called a ‘zero anniversary’ that is at once an anticipation and a retrospective construction.

Prise de la Bastille. Jean-Pierre Houël. Bibliothèque nationale de France. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Beyond the fireworks and the family fun, then, Bastille Day shows how historical dates are constructed as much out of ‘fictional presents’ as actual events. It also shows how in commemorating beginnings we actually commemorate ends (for the Revolution is truly over once dates and meanings are settled in chronological time, once there is no more debate about ‘before’ and ‘after’). Indeed it is the very ‘emptiness’ of this national holiday that allows it to stand for mythological fullness: a bona fide origin, a foundational event in the history of the French nation, rather than just another countless beginning.

Sanja Perovic teaches in the French Department at King’s College London.  Her publications include “Death by Volcano: Revolutionary Theatre and Marie-Antoinette” in French Studies (available to read for free for a limited time); The Calendar in Revolutionary France: Perceptions of Time in Literature, Culture, Politics (CUP 2012); and, as editor, Sacred and Secular Agency in Early Modern France:  Fragments of Religion (Continuum 2012).

French Studies is published on behalf of the Society for French Studies. The journal publishes articles and reviews spanning all areas of the subject, including language and linguistics (historical and contemporary), all periods and aspects of literature in France and the French-speaking world, thought and the history of ideas, cultural studies, film, and critical theory.

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Is obesity truly a public health crisis?

Obesity is often framed by public health officials as an epidemic, leading to a virtually unequivocal understanding of fat as “bad.” What this framing does not take into account, however, are the increasingly negative consequences of categorizing people – particularly women – as overweight. For instance, do “overweight” women experience higher incidences of disease because of their obesity – or because they are too embarrassed by their weight to seek preventative care from medical professionals? Moreover, what are the real health effects of fat, contrary to what dominant obesity narratives suggest? Abigail Saguy, author of What’s Wrong With Fat?, emphasizes how our popular understanding of obesity as a public health crisis is literally making us sick.

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On scientific “uncertainty” toward obesity-related health risks:

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Abigail C. Saguy, PhD is Associate Professor and Vice Chair of Sociology at UCLA and author of What’s Wrong with Fat? (Oxford, 2013).

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A trial of criminology

By P.A.J. Waddington

The British Society of Criminology annual conference was held this year at the University of Wolverhampton and its centrepiece was to hold a trial of criminology. Presided over by His Honour, Judge Michael Challinor, both the ‘prosecution’ and ‘defence’ wore wigs and gowns, and there was the usual bout of examination and cross-examination of witnesses. Of course, it was a ‘rigged’ trial because the ‘jury’ comprised nine criminologists appointed by their criminological peers. ‘Turkeys’ still avoid voting for Christmas!

It was great fun, but the debate raised a fundamental point: whether criminology as an academic discipline was artificially constrained within boundaries imposed by the criminal justice system. The prosecution, led admirably by Professor Steve Tombs, argued passionately that it was; whereas the defence, led equally splendidly by Professor Loraine Gelsthorpe, argued that criminologists had felt no constraints in venturing beyond the confines of the criminal law and those who offend against it. So, it was essentially a bidding contest in which each side strove to establish how extensive was the reach of criminology.

In my view, criminology is and should be confined by the criminal justice system. Why? Because the criminal justice system is a fascinating institution of the modern state.

Professor Tombs and his witnesses were quite correct in drawing attention to the arbitrary inclusion of certain acts within the definition of criminality despite causing only modest harm, whereas other acts that were equally, if not more, injurious were excluded. This is neatly illustrated by the law on drugs. The former government chief advisor on drugs, Professor David Nutt, lost his position in 2009 because he had the effrontery to truthfully observe that consumption of cannabis is much less harmful to the consumer than is a pint or twelve of strong lager. It is absurd that the state criminalises one and not the other.

What this should teach us is that the state is not concerned with harm per se. After all, if it was in the business of harm minimisation it would abstain from the performing the task that remains the exclusive province of the state, namely warfare. States are and always have been the really big killers on the planet. States are not a cosy club to which we subscribe in return for essential services. States rule their populations and do so by force if necessary. It is all very well for ‘world leaders’ to heap opprobrium on President Assad, but how would they respond to a revolutionary movement in their own domains?

So why does the state criminalise some acts and not others? It does so to achieve public order, without which it cannot function. On the face of it, a person who steals from another is engaged in a purely private quarrel. What has it got to do with the state? Well, the person who has lost may seek to recover those losses by direct means, i.e. taking the lost items back. Such ‘tit–for–tat’ may itself create public order problems, with people grabbing what they consider to be rightfully theirs. However, it is unlikely to stop there: ‘theft’ engenders not simply a redistribution of wealth, but a sense of grievance and not one that affects the victim alone. Restitution of loss is unlikely to quench the sense of grievance. For instance, people who are burgled often feel a deep sense of insecurity. What needs to be restored is not simply the pecuniary loss, but the sense of rightfulness that we call ‘justice’.

When the state began to burgeon into its modern form around the 17th century, so the law began to burgeon, not simply to regulate behaviour in an increasingly complex society (at which the law is conspicuously ineffective — look at speeding on the roads), but to contain the passions released by the sense of grievance felt by those on the losing end of some types of interpersonal conduct that we designate as ‘crime’. When we are victimised, the state steps in (usually in the guise of a police officer) and says to us, ‘Don’t worry. We’ll look after this’. The state is not displaying its compassion for its citizens; it is preventing us from ‘taking the law into our own hands’ — something about which legal institutions are extremely jealous.

Many criminologists bemoan the eruption of what they call ‘moral panics’. The truth is that such ‘moral panics’ are the driving force of the criminal law and its institutions. Once the state decides that it can shoulder the woes of its citizens, it opens an opportunity for ‘moral entrepreneurs’ to stimulate public passions against an increasingly wide range of social wrongs. I doubt if many criminologists would describe William Wilberforce’s campaign to end the slave trade as a ‘moral panic’, but Wilberforce was a model ‘moral entrepreneur’. Contemporary campaigns to deal more harshly with those who commit domestic violence or crimes against women are also the product of agitation by ‘moral entrepreneurs’ who have convinced the public that a man should not be entitled to give his wife ‘a good hiding’ if she errs. And they are quite right to do so, too!

When Professor Tombs and his witnesses complained that there are harms ignored by the criminal law, they are correct. Indeed, one might say that there is a limitless array of harms of which only a tiny proportion become recognised as ‘crimes’. It is when those ‘harms’ become matters of public concern, through ‘moral panics’ or ‘moral entrepreneurship’ that the state will seek to curb such passions by stepping in and saying ‘We’ll look after this’. Making something a crime enables politicians to give the impression that they are ‘doing something’ about a problem, no matter if it proves entirely ineffective or even counter-productive.

None of this, it seems to me, invalidates the study of the products of this process. Yes, it is ‘socially constructed’ but so too is the category of ‘harm’ for one person’s ‘harm’ may be another’s ‘unfortunate consequence’. If the state or a conclave of criminologists were to adjudicate on what qualifies as ‘harm’ or not, it would still fall prey to the attentions of ‘moral entrepreneurs’, acting as conduits of public outrage.

P.A.J. Waddington is Professor of Social Policy, Hon. Director, Central Institute for the Study of Public Protection, The University of Wolverhampton. He is a general editor for Policing.

A leading policy and practice publication aimed at senior police officers, policy makers, and academics, Policing contains in-depth comment and critical analysis on a wide range of topics including current ACPO policy, police reform, political and legal developments, training and education, specialist operations, accountability, and human rights.

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Image credit: Gavel on old law book. UK flag in the background. © ericsphotography via iStockphoto.

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What is the legacy of Henry VIII?

Was Henry VIII a “family man” so to speak? The notion seems vaguely ridiculous; by 1547, the philandering English monarch had laid claim to six wives, two of which he had executed, including the infamously-beheaded Anne Boleyn. However, King Henry’s children were perhaps among his most prized possessions, comprising the centerpiece of his direct succession program, through which he sought to preserve his dynasty. Here, John Guy, author of The Children of Henry VIII, revisits the unique relationship between this sixteenth century ruler and Mary I, Henry FitzRoy, Elizabeth I, and Edward VI, all of whom were envisioned to play a critical role in protecting their father’s legacy.

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John Guy is a historian who has lectured extensively on Early Modern British History and Renaissance Political Thought in both Britain and the United States. He is the author of The Children of Henry VIII, and has published 16 books in total, in addition to numerous academic articles.

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