I am of the conviction that “culture” and “identity” are themselves modern constructions, that human beings are far more potential and cross-culturally capable (“performative” in Van Binsbergen’s ritual terms) than our present models allow. I am also of the conviction that the present intellectual focus on “difference” is productive of a particular kind of scholarship and moral concern but is finally not adequate to our actual histories and shared human nature. Regardless of what many would want to insist, humanity has long been a single species, a species moreover that has absorbed, killed,
...more
