Category: Thoughts

Lago, on the blog Rational Ignorance brought up an issue in response to a blog entry by Joi Ito (Joi’s response) that I think is very important for the academic world to chew on. The net, in many respects, reproduces, in a warped and tilted fashion, the offline state of debate on almost any issue. This includes the more personal and casual reproduction of knowledge about any given issue through the commentary of blog writers like Joi, and also the cooperative and more explicit attempts to reproduce knowledge online in environments like a Wiki. I’ll be blogging more about Wikis when I get some notes in order, but for now, what I want to point out is that I think there are three central problems we face:

1) No matter how much wonderful stuff there is online, the vast majority of empirical data on just about anything is still offline. This immediately limits the ability of online postings on issues to mirror offline debates, especially in fields like mine (East Asian history), when many posters simply don’t have access to the materials. Some, like myself, hope to spend their careers getting lots of fascinating offline material online and encouraging everyone to get their ideas and research online (hopefully released for free and open exchange). Some, however, might argue that there is no compelling reason to transfer the “offline” world of knowledge to the net and that we need to give up the myth of knowledge being a cumulative enterprise.

2) The blogosphere has not only radically reduced the cost and difficulty of sharing your ideas with the web-accessing world, it has radically accelerated the speed of exchange in a global (in so far as the rich, mostly western and English-speaking blogging world can be called that) conversation called the internet. If academics, obsessed by peer review, imagine a future world in which the traditional academic discourse would simply shift online in the form of searchable journal databases and archives of various kinds, I believe they have underestimated the changes that the medium of the blog, the online forum, the wiki, and technologies like it can potentially have even on “academic” discourse in the long term. In other words, when Lago initially complains in his posting that some list of works should have been read before a particular post was made, this frustration can actually be expressed in two ways: a) the vast collection of research on a particular issue is not necessarily ignored, it is often simply not ready-at-hand in the form of a google search or some free bookmarked database. b) Even if we have access to a vast amount of material online, we (and this includes many scholars who blog too) are often compelled, out of either laziness or busyness, to post our thoughts without doing all the background research or consulting our notes. This is what Lago calls the lack of “academic rigor”.

I believe that those of us with academic aspirations must realize that a blog is not an online version of the world of academic journals. For those of us prowling the halls of the ivory labyrinth, the blogosphere might be more accurately described as the online version of a graduate seminar: Sometimes we back up our comments (postings) with logical arguments, vaguely remembered data, or a few scribbled points from our notebooks. Other times, well – other times we just pull it out of our ass.

3) The third issue is related to network effects and hegemonies in ideas. I really don’t want to “raise my hand” in this “graduate seminar” of a blogosphere to comment on this until I have read a lot more.

My friend Jae has posted an interesting entry, which includes a quote which I believe comes from a book he is reading called Bridges and Boundaries. I have yet to read this so I shouldn’t comment much on it, but the quote is quite intriguing:

“the primary goal of historians is to describe, understand and interpret individual events or a temporarily and spatially bounded series of events, whereas the primary goal of political scientists is to generalize about the relationships between variables and, to the extent possible, construct law-like propositions about social behaviour.”

This is a very nice and concise division. I imagine that this distinction would not meet with objection from many historians.

Unfortunately, the distinction horribly underestimates the ambitions of both historians and political scientists…
Continue reading Describe or Generalize

I asked my friend Jai Kasturi to take a look at the article that Derek posted a link to here in the Friends section of this site. Jai is a former engineer but now a PhD student at Columbia, studying, well, um, taking another look at the history of the world since Paul. His comments came in email form but he said I could post them here…
Continue reading Jai’s Response to the Engineer’s Look at Deconstruction

A lot of excellent bloggers are making their voices heard on the issues of social software or social networking software etc. the definition of which seems to vary with each blogger. I don’t know enough about it to organize my own thoughts, but I was amused by David Weinberger’s characterization of one of the problems of the explicit social networks registered in social software on a post at Corante:

“Real social networks are always implicit. The ones constructed explicitly are always — yes, always — infected with a heavy dose of social bullshit. It’s like thinking that the invitiation list for your wedding actually reflects your circle of friends and relatives. No, you had to invite Barry-the-Boozer because he’s your cousin and you couldn’t invite Marsha because then you’d have to invite her husband Larry-the-Ass-Grabber and her daughter Erin-the-Snot-Flinger. Explicitly constructed social networks not only lack the differentiation that makes relationships real, they are falsehoods built to reinforce spectral relationships and to avoid ending shaky ones.”

Kenneth Waltz, one of the leading scholars on international relations theory, is very careful in his work. The same can not be said for those who apply his theories. A million things separate IR theory from the history I now study and especially recent “theory” used by historians but today I’m adding a quote to Muninn’s quote database which is quite revealing of the huge gap:

“In order to test a theory…Eliminate or control perturbing variables not included in the theory under test.” – Kenneth N. Waltz Theory of International Politics p. 13

It is this “control” and “elimination” of variables (especially culture) which lies at the center of controversy. It is also, of course, a major problem with every attempt to rationalize our social world and create human “sciences”.

In and of itself, the above quote doesn’t necessarily have to become an issue, you need to dig deeper into Waltz’s analysis of the relationship between theory and reality (which depends on a pragmatist rather than a traditional correspondence theory of truth) to really debate some of the more troubling consequences of his approach.

However, such a discussion is relatively benign compared to how IR realists write and argue about real world problems. Their frequent jump from “theories” of international affairs to direct assertions about this or that state, this or that leader, and even more frighteningly the jump from the interests of the state to “my” or “our” interests all disregard the more limited claims that form the foundations of Waltz’s neo-realism.

You know…after close to 27 years on this hunk of space debris, I realized that I haven’t a clue what culture is. Note to self: Figure out what culture is.

What prompted this was a simple question? I was translating a debate from a Japan/Korea joint conference on religious education as a part time job. I came across the phrase, “…not only do we fall short in the study of other cultures but we are also severely lacking in the study of our own.”

What does it mean to study your culture? How can it be mine if it is unknown to me? In what sense are traditions, rituals, and prescriptive norms a part of “my” culture if I don’t even know about them, much less follow them…

Postman Pat has played a formative role in my childhood, but an ambivalent one at best. For those who had no exposure to the world of this happy postman, his cat, and the red Royal Post van that he drives through a sleepy country village, this posting will mean little to you.

I am, you see, haunted by Postman Pat and to this day, or rather, at least until the day before yesterday, Pat and his sleepy village have appeared randomly in my worst nightmares…
Continue reading Postman Pat Nightmares

I am very interested in the retelling of stories of armed resistance against oppressors. This is partly because they inevitably also include a portrayal of collaboration, which is something I expect to be spending a lot of time studying.

I recently watched the TV dramatization of the 1943 Jewish ghetto uprising in Warsaw called Uprising.

The uprising gets brief mention in many movies about the Holocaust, most recently with a single scene in the movie The Pianist. In that movie, the hopelessness of the uprising is viewed from the window of the hiding musician. That scene is very reminiscent of a portrayal of Chinese resistance against Japanese troops entering Shanghai in an early scene of Empire of the Sun.

Uprising takes a very different look at the Jewish resistance, awarding it more honor, glory, and considerably more German casualties than earlier portrayals or the historical record suggests. It has all the limitations of a made for TV movie, but does a fair job, especially with its more complex and careful consideration of the Jewish Council and its collaboration with the Germans. A Danish review of the movie is less forgiving, concluding that in its own way it is a wonderful old fashioned movie but that it never quite convinced us of the need to tell the story of the uprising again (“Det er på sin vis en ganske glimrende, lidt gammeldags film, som aldrig helt får overbevist os om det nødvendige i at fortælle denne historie igen”). I agree wholeheartedly with the review when it complained that the “Allo Allo english” everyone spoke was taxing.

When I see movies like this I realize that the art of portraying the nobel resistance has been been perfected to a fine art. Not to detract from the horror that faced those living in the ghetto, or under any kind of oppression that has bred resistance and artistic narratives of that resistance, I’m interested in how consistent these portrayals all are. First you need to introduce a few humble figures who just don’t want to get into any trouble, and are just trying to survive. You subject them to a series of atrocities at the hand of their oppressors, and you need to include a few scenes with completely diabolical and laughing evil soldiers who have no respect for people or the value of their lives. The main characters then become hardened realists who will do anything to kill their enemy in armed resistance, portraying anyone who has not yet been converted as weak cowards. Overnight, collaborators go from figures who are negotiated with and reluctantly obeyed, to being the targets of assassination and torture. Once this polarization is complete, the movie stands on firm black and white moral ground and can proceed with uncontrolled violence…
Continue reading Telling Stories of Resistance