In the western analytical tradition of philosophy, questions of identity have long been inclined towards asking things to the nature of What persists as a person ages? Is the person I will be in ten years the same person as I now am? Is identity one unchanging self, or a succession of selves? These are metaphysical questions which discuss, in abstract, yet pertinent terms, the properties of a…
following is my super quick and rather chaotic picks from here i sometimes tampered with things and added my own little touch:
‘Joy has to do with a lifting of ego boundaries, a relaxation of defenses, permission to be and to reveal oneself, an opening of the self’
Verena Kast
* * *
“Integrity is not a painfully upheld standard so much as a prolonged and focused delight”
(integrity) is not mere duty and performance.
Integrity from the standpoint of psychotherapy is not a matter of holding up a charade to the world, fooling others or oneself about who one really is.
(recipe to joy): By entering into a loving relation to with the self, we delight the self, and the self’s delight passes through us as a pleasure we can feel and enjoy and even scatter.
Integrity balances and restores and steers us out of difficulty and reminds us that things are not as they should be.
anxiety is alienation from the self. you are afraid others won’t like you, so you act as somebody else which cause stress.
I seem to be a match for most of life’s problems, and yet deep down something like a tightly wound ball of twine binds me relentlessly, and at times I am nothing more or less than a miserable, frightened creature, despite the clarity with which I can express myself.
Etty Hillesum, from a diary entry featured in An Interrupted Life: the Diaries, 1941-1943 and Letters from Westerbork (translated from the Dutch by Arnold J. Pomerans)
“The body is a haunted terrain—a living record of personal, familial, social, and epigenetic memory. To look at my father’s body now—the way he shuffles when he walks, the atrophy in his once-nimble fingers, the nerve pain in his feet, the cloudiness in his eyes as he loses his sight—it too is a record of a forgotten life, and of the systems that failed it. I carry the memory of him in his splendor and his decline. And what I carry of him is also connected to the land, its seam connecting memory, legacy into the future. Memory itself is a kind of map, linked to textures, smells, songs, places, the act of remembering in and of itself a kind of haunting. Music is one of the few portals I have into my fragmented memory, and writing the only way I know to recover my people from the nothing of forgetting, to resist the erasure of the border and its constant overwriting of history, to salvage what is disappearing.”
—Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, from “La Cancion de la Nena,” Oxford American (Summer 2021)
How much earlier has now been made dramatically clear by a recent discovery by a team of researchers at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom. They found that the chemical precursors of two important neurotransmitters, or signaling molecules used in nervous systems, appear in all the major animal groups that preceded creatures with central nervous systems.
The big surprise, however, is that these molecules are also present in single-celled relatives of animals, called choanoflagellates. This finding shows that animal neuropeptides originated before the evolution of even the very first animals.
The discovery “solves a long-standing question about when and how animal neuropeptides evolved,” said Pawel Burkhardt, who studies the evolutionary origin of neurons at the Sars International Center for Marine Molecular Biology in Norway. It also indicates that at least some of the signaling molecules fundamental to the operation of our brains first evolved for an entirely different purpose in organisms that consisted of only a single cell.
“When a human being becomes a set of data on a Web site like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned.”
Right in the middle of my life I awoke in a strange wood.
Now confronting the strange is an experience retold across cultures; travelogues and journeys of adventure are not limited to the West, or to modern times. The roles are often the same, but the faces different, depending on a culture or period. But this type of story has found a special place in the hearts and minds of white men during the preceding ages.
It is difficult to separate the influence of stories told and held dear in the real lives of conquistadors and presidents, from the influence of grander, socially-constructed, historical narratives and assumptions about the world. Certainly they inform each other. What is more, this process of mutual inspiration between the literary and lived narratives of history has no discernible beginning.
It has no boundary between cultures, it has no boundary between the ages, but inquiring about the fruits of Western Civilization requires us to sort back through this same network of branches, stems, and roots. Truly, it is a strange wood.
There are really only two characters in these stories, the Self, and mirrors of that self, and the Other, and mirrors of the other. If they realize their sameness, then the story has ended in heaven. If they find themselves in hell, then that particular story begins again.
A Category of Difference, Conflict
Usually there is a projected confrontation between what we consider like ourselves, and an entity that is what we consider different, not like us; the Other. What really varies is the resolution of this confrontation, whether or not the two parties are joined, and whether or not someone changes in the process.
It is interesting how the Self and Other will change costumes, through ages and authors. But for the Amer-Euro world in recent millennia the Self has overwhelmingly been presented as white and male (frequently also dawning the tropes of poverty, or a soldierly career), and the Other is defined by a different ethnicity and skin tone, often female (but only by sex – these are not like the ‘familiar’ kind).
Monstrosity and Civilization
Beyond this point the Other (as with the resolution) will be informed by an author’s particular purpose, pride and/or ignorance. The Other will be given any number of additional traits marking her as different in ideology & religion, or in physical appearance; bestial and animalistic traits denoting something uncivilized and dehumanized in commensurate measure to an author’s own feelings of having been nurtured by those institutions. So that this animalistic quality can be seen as monstrous in its opposition to Civilization, or as spiritually more pure in being closer to nature (depending on a creators reverence for either one).
Wedding and a Funeral (A Dowry or Inheritance)
White guy ends up in a strange place, women end up falling in love with him and wanting to make him ruler of the land, in the least he becomes a transformative leader.
With this short summary I could be describing an amazing array of narratives, tied to any number of historic moments (sometimes retrospectives) and moods. From contemporary films like (Avatar, Oz the Great and Powerful, Dances with Wolves, Lawrence of Arabia, and there are galaxy of others) to popular and respected works of literary cannons (from Heart of DarknesstoDune), nearly every platform has been used to manifest this social peculiarity. Many of these are more optimistic than seemingly dangerous, but by their utilization of these tropes they are no less indicted of White Male Syndrome.
Articles reviewed below suggest how popular reproductions of what is considered ‘Other’—whether by race, gender, or any other measure – have been historically tied to cumulative phases and needs of the economy, or surrounding specific wars, or yet vaguer zeitgeists.
From the genres of medieval romance, and the accumulated folk tales they represent, previous posts demonstrated the antiquity of this phenomenon. The Sergas de Esplandian was alive in the minds of Spanish Explorers, just as earlier stories had similarly chronicled the expanding world-view of Westerners from at least the days of Alexander the Great.
Rapists, Tramps, and Thieves
And if the story is of a different kind of stranger ending up in a White land, then the literature suggests that the ending will be considerably grimmer (especially if he goes near the women – see here,here, and here).
Calafia from the Sergas: “very large in person, the most beautiful of all of them, of blooming years, and in her thoughts desirous of achieving great things, strong of limb and of great courage.
And Candace from the Alexander Romances:
"the whole of her country as ruled by a woman of remarkable beauty, in her early middle age (…) She was above normal human size and almost godlike in appearance."139
“He crossed all the land beneath the sun - no habitable part was omitted (…) deliberating whether to enter the uninhabited regions (…) they made a ten-day expedition. Suddenly there appeared women of terrifying appearance and ferocious countenance, their whole bodies covered with hair … When the soldiers saw them and without thinking charged at them, the women turned about and killed four by tearing them apart with their nails; then they ate them up before the army’s eyes, and even licked up th eblood where it had fallen."174
Exploring a strange new world, tales of the monstrous and the fabulous, as a type of story these are very old, enduring, and probably take shape across cultures (though I can only speak from my place in the West).
Recently seeing the Movie Oz(….), I was reminded of early European popular fiction, like the Sergas… in the minds of the Conquistadors (see here). This genre and specific set of tales, while notable in the history and naming of California, had previously reminded me of similar figures and tropes in literature preceding the Sergas well into antiquity (see the page tagged Warrior Queens on the side bar).
The tale of Calafia specifically made me recall the tales of Candace (or Kandake) from the Alexander Romances, a genre of tales written continuously in each succeeding age since Alexanders conquests in the 300’s BCE–presumably originating in the recounts of those original soldiers but over the years transforming into the truly fantastic.
The Armenians had preserved a large body these tales (as I am told by The Greek Alexander Romance as translated by Richard Stoneman (penguin classics)). This is where I began seeing the long-scale connections, for the Armenians were subsumed by the Byzantine Empire around 1000 CE, and their diaspora their persisted until the Turkish conquest just before 1500 CE. Their stories and histories no doubt admixed with the Byzantines and when both groups went westward fleeing Ottoman rule, they inspired the revived classicism of the Renascence.
This revival would also inspire the popular press of the day, often over looked by history for their provincial literary merits and skewed renderings of actual events. But it is precisely these stories which inspired the explorers of that age, and perhaps their drive to observe the fantastic, or to marry an amazon or too.
My point in this is that the collection of tales gathered under the ‘Alexander Romances’ are an excellent lens to observe the continuous manifestation of these literary devices, psychological projections on a cultural scale: the self, the other, the strange, the fantastic. And how they very often play out in terms of gender and race (with very real world consequences).
It would be fruitful to study the similarities between the popular Spanish story that introduced the idea of California to the world in such a fantasy, with the recounts of the Alexander romances. Specifically descriptions of places outside the charted world, abundant in gold and jewels, where above normal sized warrior women rule, subject themselves to marring the outsiders, they use magical beasts in combat (in the romances they are sphinxes, in the Sergas they are griffons), and they are governed by a queen who shares a hereditary position and name (in the Sergas its Calafia, in the romances is Candace).
such passages as: ’ Know ye that at the right hand of the Indies there is an island called California, very close to that part of the Terrestrial Paradise, which was inhabited by black women without a single man among them, and they lived in the manner of Amazons. They were robust of body with strong passionate hearts and great virtue. ’ [Sergas de Esplandian, via the wiki commons]
are remarkably similar to those in the romances, where Alexanders army, marching into the unknown world finds lands and islands of resplendent bounty and:
“here dwell the Amazons, who are larger than other races of women and remarkable for their beauty and strength. …They wear silver weapons and axes… they are notable for their intelligence and quick wits” [the Greek Alexander Romances, Stoneman 146].
**the Silver weapons are similar to the Golden ones the Sergas describes (like the similarity and discrepancy of griffons/sphinxes previously mentioned)
I actually thought the recent film Oz the Great and Powerful was pretty fun, (and more spooky and emotionally engaging than I was expecting).
I have to take issue with the press its getting, specifically I’d like to respond to this
It’s not sexist, so much as it portrays certain realities of early 20th Century mid-western gender relations/assumptions. Further, the active female characters and their plans for Oz shape the plot and conflict - James Franco’s Wizard gets caught and used in these but ultimately taught a lesson so that he’s not the person wielding early 20th century mid-western gender relations/assumptions, as in the beginning. He is no-longer dehumanizing ‘the Other’. Still, true to life, those early sins have wrought pain upon the present.
As a re-imagining of existing material it was surprisingly reverent without being awful, and it skips right along. Though it probably looks strange if not in 3d.
Bridge game: Nurse Aiko Hamaguchi, Nurse Chiye Yamanaki, Miss Catherine Yamaguchi, Miss Kazoko Nagahama at Manzanar Relocation Center, California, one of ten camps where over 110,000 Japanese-Americans were incarcerated during WWII. 1943.
Photo by Ansel Adams
more pictures of hyper-Americanized, hyper-feminized Japanese women taken and circulated during the internment.
Female internees practicing calisthenics at Manzanar War Relocation Center, Owens Valley, California.
In 1943, Ansel Adams followed an invitation by newly appointed camp director Ralph Merritt to photograph the everyday life of the Japanese American internees in the camp. Unlike his colleague Dorothea Lange, whose pictures for the War Relocation Authority focused on the hardship and humiliation of the deportation and internment, Adams’s intent was to “show how these people, suffering under a great injustice, (…) had overcome the sense of defeat and despair by building for themselves a vital community in an arid (but magnificent) environment.” (Ansel Adams, 1965)
Kevin Starr describes the debate over allowing California into the Union, as it hung on the issue of slavery, or the South’s “peculiar institution” (p73). This is a belittling way to describe slavery, as if it were peculiar to the South, or particular to the antebellum period. It is representative of a certain misconception that many continue to perpetuate, as described on the website for the modern non-profit anti-slavery group, TraffickFree.org:
“ there are more slaves now than ever before in human history - approximately 27 million around the world (….) “17,500 slaves are brought into the United States every year “
So in the least it is a poor choice of words on Starr’s part, but also seems to contradict information he admits to later in the chapter, albeit in a mitigated vocabulary:
“immigrants who arrived at Sutter’s Fort (…) contracted from him the labor (and sometimes it has been alleged, the sexual services) of Native Americans indentured to Sutter or otherwise under his control, many of them little better off than slaves.” [pp77-78]
I must wonder what he qualifies in their situation as being ‘not quite as bad as’ slavery-slavery.
Like the seats of a teeter-totter, the surge of outsiders into California during the Gold Rush brought with it a commensurate decline in the lives and cultures of Native Americans. In many ways this pattern copies the earlier interaction of Spanish colonials and Native’s in the first days of settlement and the introduction of the mission-system. For this reason, when Starr waxes poetically about the Gold Rush “…reprising the dreams of the Spanish conquistadores, explorers, and maritime adventurers…” or that “the quest for El Dorado was now being Americanized with its psychological and mythic hold as powerful as ever” [p.81], he belies the real pattern of greed and exploitation that was recurring.
With that being said, the Gold Rush must still be credited with bringing an unprecedented cultural diversity to the State, even at the expense of the indigenous cultural diversity that was supplanted in the process. This diversity would at least provide grounds for a cosmopolitan conversation on race and cultural diversity, even if it was rather immature in its early days. Truly people came from all over the world and became a part of this new conversation.
Castaneda is capturing my attention currently, she has a wealth of really articulate and well informed observations. Specifically I will have to bear this passage in mind (where this posts title is found):
Terrorism, militarism, and war masculinize the world, irrespective of how many women serve in the military or conduct suicide missions.1 Using gender to justify war in the twentieth century—bombing Afghanistan to “liberate” Afghan women from Afghan men, for example—recodes gendered hierarchies and relations of power that have, since the sixteenth century, sexualized conquest and justified European imperialism. The gender and sexual politics of religious fundamentalism, whether in the name of contemporary Christianity, Islam, or Judaism, continue to reify patriarchal, misogynist, and heterosexist structures of domination worldwide. “Global capitalism,” our postmodern restructured economy, exploits the labor of men, women, and children within gendered and sexed structures of power framed centuries ago. In the “global market place” women and girls of color remain the target of brutal sexual violence and murder, only now in “free trade zones”; are prey to rape by human smugglers and “law enforcement” agents, including border patrols; and are kept captive in homes where they are maids, housekeepers, and nannies in the “domestic economy of service.” The expanding market in “sexual tourism” is a hugely profitable, global phenomenon.
The rapacity of capitalism is well documented, as is the brutality of war, even as both are occluded from public discussion and/or sanitized in public media owned by a few conglomerates. What is not well documented, and what the articles in this volume elucidate, is the inseparability of gendered politics and other politics that produce/reproduce the U.S.-Mexico borderlands to create the issues we live with today: terrorism, war, and imperial hegemony.
Introduction: Gender on the Borderlands Castañeda, Antonia. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Volume 24, Number 2 & 3, 2003, pp. xi-xix (Article) Published by University of Nebraska Press
Soldiers, Priests, Convicts (see Starr p47)–the earliest European colonists in California sound like an odd mix and one in tragic lack of estrogen. So when we discuss the position of women in California, especially in the earlier part of this question, what is really being asked about is the lives of specifically Native, Indian Women.
The groups of historians that Castaneda examined are all tinged in their own ways with misguided perspectives based on ego or racisim, and only since the later half of the twentieth century has serious study been undertaken to understand the histories of women and non-Europeans. Kevin Starr himself doesn’t seem to have too much to offer on the role of women in this period, though he does describe on page 47, that there was very little inter-marriage in California, as opposed to the case in other parts of colonial Spain where classes of mixed-race citizens were generated. It is rather telling that a white mans inclusion of women’s history means a detail on marriage.
It was very interesting in the Castaneda article, that while these early historians “fundamentally reflect the political and socio-racial ideology that informed both the war with Mexico and the subsequent socio-political and economic marginalization of Mexicans in California” (p8) what little positive report they did draw upon was from those Euro-Americans that had been to California in the decades before war, as part of those merchants and traders coming to aid the region and diversify society when Spain could not maintain the colony by itself. Starr identifies inter-national marriage in a limited sense, describing how some of these merchants married into the established Spanish-Mexican wealthy families in the days after independence from Spain. However, his description is a rather uninformative list, again dumbly focusing on the issue of marriage [p.59].
After the war the discourse becomes more negative it seems, and its interesting to note the narratives of fantasy of “Spanish-speaking women [who] invited the advances of EuroAmerican men whom they anxiously awaited as their saviors from Mexican men” [Castaneda, p10]. This American type of narrative sounds a lot like those first fantastic tales and romances of Calafia that motivated the first Spanish explorers, even though Starr described this as the heeding of a “medieval mindset” different from contemporary mindsets presumably, but errantly, for here the same theme continued in the minds of Americans in the 19thand 20th century.
The realities for non-white women seems to have changed little from the mission-presidio days, through to its colonization by white Americans. Castaneda says “conquest and racism intensified sexual assault… non-white women could be raped with impunity, just as they could be enslaved, killed, or worked to death.” [p15].
Castañeda, A. I. (1990). Gender, Race, and Culture: Spanish-Mexican Women in the Historiography of Frontier California. Frontiers: A Journal Of Women Studies, (1), 8.
On page 21 of California by Kevin Starr, he describes the Spanish Explorer’s willingness to believe in fanciful tales like those of cities of gold or fountains of youth. Specifically he says “Today it is easy to dismiss such stories as fairy tales, but in the early sixteenth century, among a people not yet fully emerged from a medieval mindset and gifted with vivid imaginations, such myths and legends possessed the power to motivate some of the most arduous and heroic overland and maritime expeditions in human history.” This is rather sweeping and grandiose, and it seems foolish to describe actions motivated by apparent greed and ending in the destruction of entire populations as “heroic.” Further it seems to obscure historical processes and perpetuate a certain arrogance in assuming a “medieval mindset” – something we apparently don’t have to worry about anymore – as the agent for human gullibility.
These “heroic” men were apparently looking for what the stories had promised them (as you can learn from a closer reading of the Calafia tale), specifically beautiful and exotic women who would marry them, convert to their religions and in doing assure European ego’s of their superiority, all while presenting them with their very kingdoms, gold jewels and a life of leisure in terrestrial paradise. These men ended up affording that leisure with the slave labor of Indians, and while they didn’t find any ravishing, willing, amazons they did find plenty of opportunities for rape.
Again, I don’t think this is a product of some former mindset humans have evolved past. Large endeavors with gruesome consequence are still organized around media spin and the manipulation of public opinion through modern lies and ‘fairy tales,’ i.e. a foreign invasion will be greeted as a liberating force of democracy, or individual terrorist acts that come with the promised reward of 'virgins’ in heaven.
