Muninn

The new Korea podcast SeoulGlow looks very promising. View the Youtube video below for a fascinating set of interviews of high school students preparing to take the college entrance exam, and view the spectacle of police rushing late students to the exams:

The creator of this video podcast is Michael Hurt, who writes at one of the best Korea weblogs out there, the Scribblings of the Metropolitician. He is especially good discussing issues of race and identity in contemporary Korea.

Timothy Garton Ash The File: A Personal History (BF)

The File is a highly reflective and contemplative journey of the author Timothy Garton Ash, a trained historian and journalist, through his East German Ministry for State Security (MfS or Stasi) file. Ash has written widely about central and eastern Europe in the last years and aftermath of Communist and the Cold War. He earned his Stasi intelligence file during his time spent as a Oxford based researcher, claiming to be studying Nazi period Berlin while in fact collecting material for a book on East Germany. After the Stasi identified him as an author critical of the East, he was banned from entry into East Germany for number of years. Ash compares his diary notes about his time spent behind the iron curtain with his Stasi file, available to him and to everyone who has a file through the elaborate East German Gauck Authority since 1991. He identifies and confronts most of his informers as well as many of the Stasi officers listed in his file and at various points explains the system of domestic intelligence in a country where one in fifty East Germans were directly connected with the secret police (p84).

If confronting and exposing informers was all this book was about, it would not be much of an impressive achievement. As Ash himself notes, the work would amount to the vain and disruptive project of a famous journalist (who never truly suffered anything under Communism) written for his own and other readers’ amusement.

Instead, I found the book particularly interesting because Ash uses all of this to repeatedly pose a number of other more difficult questions that historians in general, researchers of and citizens in post-transition regimes in particular need to consider. Some of his observations build on eachother:
(more…)

Carl Linné, who plays an important role in the creation of the nomenclature of the biological world (Linnaeus, W) separated the homo sapiens into a number of subcategories (1758).

1. Wild man. Four-footed, mute, hairy.
2. American. Copper-coloured, choleric, erect. Hair black, straight,
thick; nostrils wide; face harsh; beard, scanty; obstinate, content, free.
Paints himself with fine red lines. Regulated by customs.
3. European. Fair, sanguine, brawny. Hair yellow brown, flowing; eyes
blue; gentle, acute, inventive. Covered with close vestments. Governed
by laws.
4. Asiatic. Sooty, melancholy, rigid. Hair black; eyes dark; severe,
haughty, covetous. Covered with loose garments. Governed by
opinions.
5. African. Black, phlegmatic, relaxed. Hair black, frizzled; skin silky;
nose flat; lips tumid; crafty, indolent, negligent. Anoints himself with
grease. Governed by caprice.

I must say I’m partial to loose garments, but I’m not sure about the rest…
Which would you choose to be?

(Separate from this are “monsters” which include dwarfs and giants and “anthropomorpha” like eunuchs.)

I saw this quoted in Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation p. 32 but you can also find it here and cited as in:

Sir Charles Linne, A General System of Nature through the Three Grand Kingdoms ofAnimals, Vegetables and Minerals, 7 vols, Lackington, Allen and Co., London, 1806, vol. 1, p. 9.