Female Engagement Teams

 I had stumbled into this topic on weak recollections from my Course of Actions research and of my admiration for David Petraeus and his command of the Surge during the 2nd Gulf War.

I watched this youtube video, which at least interviewed the women being trained, even though the audio quality was somewhat shaky. This in turn lead me to write-ups in military online journals: Raymond Kareko's article or Pottinger's explanation of their support. I did not peruse Ashley's War, but felt intrigued to look into it.

All of that ran quickly however into Sippi Azarbaijani-Moghaddam's criticism of the background assumptions, based on a more detailed analysis of the sociological and anthropological setup that she was able to provide as a university-trained anthropologist and a long-term collaborator of the aid organisations working in Afghanistan. Both in larger context contributions from 2009 and specific analyses from within the conflict (2012) she gave clearer models of the complexities of interaction that cast doubt on FET aspirations.

Her later work for the Conversation (here and here) she discussed the symbolic communication on violence that the Taliban used but that the west did not appreciate or understand either.

Abductive Aspects of Interpretation

Under the assumption that a text has an architecture, that architecture is accessible only though abduction. The proof then becomes the pudding, because the role that the pieces play just so in the text validates the structure in the reconstruction. 

In the emplotment of historical texts, the facts play multiple roles in the discourse with the audience. They provide points of stability through agreement ("The Normans conquered England in 1066") or they teach novel facts and interpretations (whose novelty is of course dependent on the level of expertise of the readers). The whole point of offering yet another emplotment is to correct the existing ones, and that requires either new facts or new interpretations (and preferably both). 

Writers therefore have a model of the questions and the lack of information that the readers have and they write toward that model: to answer the questions and to supply the information that will make the readers agree with their architecture. 

Perhaps it is too much to say that each text creates a language for a special purpose (or a domain-specific language, to use that technical term), but probably each discipline and sub-discipline does. And that functions both as short-hand (writing takes time even with word processors) and as a model for thinking about the right types of problems.

We would like it to be the case that the architecture and its realisation using the facts and the interpretative fragments is mechanically verifiable. That makes it easier for the writer to adjust the whole without breaking the parts, to experiment with attitudes and stances, and to adjudicate if choices in one place amount to consistent stances in other parts. 

What is decidedly necessary is a way to rule out alternates and make clear why they are being rejected. This is part of dealing with the questions and the expectations of the audience. Didn't Odo of Bayeux commission the tapestry to suck up to his half-brother that he had insulted by siding with his enemies? Well, no, and here is why. That is the function of the precedent and the literature review.

This is also useful because it allows rerunning the narrative, if we think of it as a conceptual program, at a later point in time with altered insights. If the dating shifts, if the source becomes discredited, then we can see what that means for the remainder of the argument. Perhaps this is then no longer the stance of X, who may no longer be able to participate in the argument; but it may approximate the stance that X could have taken, as best as we know, given the new information. 

The drawback of all of this is of course that the abductive process repeats and re-occurs at the various levels of the interpretation, whether it be the text as a whole, the individual claims, the specific meaning of the words used, or the scripts employed to make progress on the problems. 

The problem is also that we primarily wish to rule out narratives, but the number of wrong narratives is of course too large to manage properly. So we need succinct ways of explaining plausible candidate narratives that we can then rule out equally succinctly, as a representational problem. 

Modeling the under-determination

The most important change that we need to make in talking about historiographical interpretation is that we know what is true. We do not know what is true, what really happened, and similar.

At the same time, we have to insist that some interpretations are false. As Umberto Eco pointed out long ago, if no interpretation is false, then every text is the same text, and there is only one text. The phone book of Vienna from 1973 is the same thing as Lenin's writings. If we cannot reject an interpretation, then there is no way to differentiate them, and it is all the same.

That combination of there being no true one answer but many wrong answers must strike many people as strange because most people know that not-true is false and not-false is true. Due to this symmetry that setup is then confusing.

The first point to make then is that this switch from true to false using negation only works in the case of a complete disjunction. We already said that we want to assume that not all texts are the same text, so we have at least two interpretations. So if the competing interpretations A and B are up for discussion, and we can show not-A, then the disjunction allows us to conclude B. So if two people Alice and Bea are locked in a room with a hard piece of candy, and the candy is gone, and we can prove that Alice did not eat it, then Bea must have eaten it. 

For most historical events, however, this strategy fails because the disjunction of interpretations remains open. As David Hume pointed out in Dialogs concerning Natural Religion, some of these either-or arguments suffer from a lack of alternatives or become far from clear when other alternatives are considered (famously, that the world might be like a plant). The most obvious present day case is the restricted alternative between evolution and intelligent design, where the problems of evolution only can imply an affirmation of intelligent design if there are no competing interpretations.

So for the first measure of approximation, historiography cannot show what the true narrative is, only that there are false narratives because the disjunction of interpretations is not complete. Notice that psychologically, this may still be a problem, because a very large number of competing interpretations is almost an attack on conceptual resources, an interpretative denial-of-service strategy.

The next question then becomes however, how to show that an interpretation is false. Suppose that our hard candy contains a substance that some people have allergic reactions to. Suppose further that Alice has in the past shown allergic reactions. Then we can mount an argument that either Alice would have had an allergic reaction or that Alice did not eat the hard candy. Very quickly the devil shows itself in all the details as the tree of dependence and justification begins to extend downward into the minutiae of cellular biology, chemistry, and medicine of human food allergies. And that is just the natural science side of the problem. There are also other events that are historical in that chain, that have the same disjunction of interpretations intervening between the chemical processes, say, and the conclusions that we wish to draw for adjudicating between A and B. Perhaps Alice's prior episode was misdiagnosed; perhaps the reaction was caused by another allergenic substance; perhaps the evidence for that episode is suspect (Alice's grandmother told her, because Alice was too young at the time to remember herself). 

However to resolve the conundrum of the interpretative process, what should be clear though is that we need to be ready to accommodate a shift in the truth value of our supports at any point in time. Precisely because the supports of the sub-theories might shift with any new piece of evidence; precisely because none of these matters are monotonic in the logical sense of the word---truth maintenance as part of the ongoing process of rejustification in the face of discovery becomes paramount. 

Jouko Väänänen's Short Course on Finite Model Theory

Jouko Väänänen, who also authored the higher-order logic page at the Stanford (Internet) Encyclopedia of Philosophy, published his lecture notes as an introduction to finite model theory, based on his teaching them in Lissabon in 1993 and Helsinki in 1994.

His remarks are extremely helpful in following the basic gist. After disproving the compactness theorem (as Fagin had done in 1993), he comments:

It is only natural that the Compactness Theorem should fail, because its very idea is to generate examples of infinite models. (5)

In the lecture notes, the Trakhtenbrot Theorem of 1950 is proven, namely that the set of finitely valid first order sentences is not recursively enumerable (by mapping it onto the halting problem, which is also undecidable).  From the fact that Sat is recursively enumerable but undecidable, it follows that its "complement" cannot be recursively enumerable. This has the consequence that neither the Completeness Theorem nor the Dowardward Löwenheim-Skolem Theorem hold.

The process of Orthodoxy

The difficulty for any religious movement is that its internal justification for stability is the pointer back into the founding times, into in illo tempore, where the orthodoxy was completely revealed and implementable, while from the external viewpoint, the orthodoxy is the end result of the process.

The internal justification has a hard time with the fact that the external view often can point to internal events that tilt the trajectory one way or the other without any justification in the terms of the dogmatics.

For example, the resolution of the contention between the Judeo-Christians for whom the Gospel of Matthews is written and the Hellenistic Christians targeted by the works of Luke is not independent of the population sizes of these two groups, nor of the wars that the Jewish state fought against the Romans after the initial destruction of Jerusalem (which both Gospels assume). It is even possible that at the time of Matthews, the plane was already tipped against the Judeo-Christian groups, possibly by evicting the early Christian community that was Jewish from Jerusalem before its destruction in 70 ad (so the German Wikipedia on Judeo-Christians).

Clearly, Paul's writings presume a more Hellenistic and less Judeo-Christian setting and support that possibility, especially when considering the differences in the depiction of the Apostel Convention in Jerusalem (Gal 2 vs Acts 15).

Amusingly, one of the main time points in this process of the separation is the synod of Jamnia, that has itself the structure of a time point that is supposed to encapsulate a process---not only the termination of the canonical structure of the Hebrew Bible, but also the expulsion of the Judeo-Christians from the synagogue and the elevation of the Nazarim as a heretical sect into the Birkat HaMinim. As Günter Stermberg is quoted at the end of the German Wikipedia article on Jamnia, the retelling of the tradition made

aus vielfältigen, kontroversen und widerstrebenden Prozessen ein punktuelles Ereignis

out of a plurality of controverse and antagonistic processes a single-point outcome (own translation)

 QED

Rule Probabilities and Quantification

In Artificial Intelligence of the symbolic kind, it is often the case that probabilities are applicability constraints that are simply attached to the rules.

[In some survey of some part of the populace,] 80% of all Biritsh scientists are the children of scientists [the oldest child, an only child, etc].

The problem with these types of examples is that they disguise how the probabilities end up affecting the quantifier structure. This is especially true when we deal with a language that supports exceptions (i.e. non-monotonic changes) in the knowledge capture because there the extremes are best captured as exceptions.

None of the cities of of the Roman empire, excepting Rome itself, had more than five hundred thousand citizens.

(exceptWhen (equalSymbols ?CITY Rome)
    (=> (and (isa ?CITY City) (subOrganization ?CITY RomanEmpire)
             (population ?CITY ?POP))
        (lessThan ?POP 500000)))

(with appropriate temporal restrictions somewhere, e.g. implied by the Roman empire membership or on the  population number).

At the same time, at the middle range of the distribution, it would be most natural to speak of existential quantification, perhaps baths or amphitheaters, or a temple dedicated to a specific deified hero or an oriental fertility cult.

Thus we observe that a continuous model (probabilities [0,1]) meet a discrete model of quantifiers and exceptions, and we expect the continuous model to deal with data changes more gracefully, especially if the representation of discrete parts is not automatically driven by continuous representation. Perhaps we could consider 1% and 99% as the cutoffs for 'none' and 'all' (not in principle, in a specific case), and have rules to then conclude the discrete quantifier structure from the data distribution and its interpretation?

Improving Scripts

For some scripts, it would seem helpful to know not merely which scenes follow which scenes, but also what the temporal constraints are on the individual scenes to get them accomplished.

Consider Arthur C Danto's example of lighting a pipe; if the match burns at the standard rate, then there are just a few moments until the match is too hot to hold and needs to be dropped. Similarly, for a recipe, there are time constraints on how soon the next processing steps have to take place before the processed food has changed in temperature or composition or moisture contents to make the next step less successful (or even impossible).

At the same time, similar constraints hold in the other direction of moving "too early" as it were. The rates of these changes put temporal bounds on the script that would be good to know and good to have.

Reactions to Schank

In my previous post,  I reviewed Roger Schank's Tell me a Story, New York (Scribener) 1990 (= NWU Press, 1995) as to the problem of how to construct narratives, what constituent pieces are, and especially how to challenge or critique them. Though in the previous post, I mentioned three examples of analysis by Schank, I mostly focused on Tawana Brawley and on Iran Air Flight 655 getting shot down by the USS Vincennes, leaving Canadian Olympic gold-medalist runner Ben Johnson aside.

In musing over my dialogue with Schank, I wanted to offer some preliminary stabilization of my thoughts in terms of some theses to historiography---especially in the aftermath of the political display of revisionist Southern supremacy history in Charlottesville. Some of these are issues that Schank is concerned about and some of them I do not take him to care about.

1. Schank is right that story skeletons and their selection form an initial stance on the problem that even leads to the filtering of information or adaptation of memories. In fact, if Schank had the benefit of hindsight that we have, he could have pointed to the US Navy's explanation of scenario confirmation offered to the BBC in 2000 for the precise behavior that his story skeletons had predicted in terms of filtering incoming information.
2. Schank correctly distinguishes between story, skeleton and gist. The story is the actual production of the human talker, targeting the listener. The skeleton is the summary of the basic telos and gives explanation patterns at hand (more of that probably in Schank's prior book on Explanation Patterns). The gist is the cake mix, to use an analogy from cooking, that can be turned into a variety of cakes that all share a distinct family resemblance. Knowledge about what my current guests like and what I have quickly at hand inform the actual execution.
3. Schank's skeletons provide an easy ingress into his theory for content analysis. The arguments made and the supports advanced and the information elided (if we can reconstruct it) come from the telos of the skeletons that is truly most like a political stance.

1. Because Schank does not do much with the evidence/story or fact/narrative distinction (possibly because his biases against expert systems and automated theorem proving), he misses out on the ability to postulate that facts are stories for a subculture that no longer can or wishes to treat these stories narratively. They are as if baked, and questioning them can be interpreted as a violation of the norms of the subculture. Even low level sensor readings have these stories behind them, and this holds true even in particle physics (cf Knorr-Czetina), where the individual detectors in a setup such as the CERN super-collider are attributed 'personality' (in a anaphoric sense) because of their non-interchangeable behaviors. Unlike edible cookies however, facts can be unbaked back into stories if there are anomalies, provided the research data is available. Thus, bad footnotes or page references ghost through the literature until some brave grad-student hunts them down and slays them. For many historical documents, that is not possible, and here the community finds the line drawn for it. 
2. Schank has no locus for the social role of power in the success of narratives, because he does not distinguish the UN Security Council adequately from a US district court or the admiralty of the US Navy. Schank tries to rope this in while looking at the story expectations, but that is really a small aspect of the problem only. His use of made-up stories or divorcee self-reports is equally ill-suited to discover this, as in the first case everyone knows the story is not real (thus there are no real validity requirement or possibility) while in the second case our culture considers it flat-out rude to question people's divorce narratives. 
3. Schank is handicapped by his focus on the genre newspaper articles and transcript of psychological experiment. He looks a bit at screenplays as well, but never clarifies how the fictional status of these works interacts with the realistic status of the newspaper article or the emotional stance of the transcribed individual.

Explanation in the Golden Bough

In describing the Arician Grove, Frazer writes--all quotes from the two-volume Golden Bough (Vol 1, Vol 2) edition of 1894:

Such was the rule of the sanctuary. A candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him he held office till he was himself slain by a stronger or a craftier. 

This strange rule has no parallel in classical antiquity, and cannot be explained from it. (GB-1894, v1, p.2) 

And then Frazer goes on to spell out what his concept of explanation is.

It is the very rudeness and barbarity of the custom which allow us a hope of explaining it. For recent researches into the early history of man have revealed the essential similarity with which, under many superficial differences, the human mind has elaborated its first crude philosophy of life. Accordingly if we can show that a barbarous custom, like that of the priesthood of Nemi, has existed elsewhere; if we can detect the motives which led to its institution; if we can prove that these motives have operated widely, perhaps universally, in human society, producing in varied circumstances a variety of institutions specifically different but generically alike; if we can show, lastly, that these very motives, with some of their derivative institutions, were actually at work in classical antiquity, then we may fairly infer that at a remoter age the same motives gave birth to the priesthood of Nemi. (p.3)

Frazer assumes a structural equivalence across the human race for the "first crude philosophy of life", which is the origin of the "custom" we wish to explain. This assumption allows us to go wide and search other times and places (i.e. "elsewhere") and discover the structural similarities of the customs practiced in other places and at other times. Frazer sees the customs or "institutions" as responses to "motives".  [RCK: it is quite possible that Frazer does not distinguish between institutions and customs much, as one of the meanings of the Latin word "institutiones" is "custom", e.g. Cicero, Attic Nights.]

Thus if the motives so isolated led to comparable customs and institutions across time and space, and these motives can be shown to be present in classical antiquity, it is probable to assume that they led to similar outcomes, i.e. "the same motives gave birth to the priesthood of Nemi".

In order to understand the Frazerian notion of motives, we need to look to this Paragraph 2 (pp.7-), titled Primitive Man and the Supernatural, where Frazer expounds his theory of the relationship between primitive man, the supernatural and causality, especially with reference to the task of influencing the agricultural necessities of rain and sunshine (cf. (p.13) below).

A savage hardly conceives the distinction commonly drawn by more advanced peoples between the natural and the supernatural. To him the world is mostly worked by supernatural agents, that is, by personal beings || acting on impulses and motives like his own, liable like him to be moved by appeals to their pity, their fears and their hopes. In a world so conceived he sees no limit to his power of influencing the course of nature to his own advantage ... [his tools being, RCK] prayers, promises, or threats [which, RCK] may secure him fine weather and an abundant crop from the gods .... (pp.8-9)

In the limit, this similarity ends in the notion of incarnation:

... and if a good should happen, as he sometimes believes, to become incarnate in his own person, then he need appeal to no higher power; he, the savage, possesses in himself all the supernatural powers necessary to further his own well-being and that of his fellow man. (p.9)

But this is not the sum-total of Frazer's conceptual tools; for side-by-side with it is that precursor, the "germ of the modern notion of natural law or the view of nature as a series of events occurring in an invariable order without the intervention of personal agency" (p.9), as Frazer sees it, namely sympathetic magic.

One of the principles of sympathetic magic is that any effect may be produced by imitating it. (p.9)

To choose two agricultural examples that Frazer cites.

In Thüringen the man who sows flax carries the seed, in a long bag which reaches from his shoulders to his knees, and he walks with long strides, so that the bag sways to and fro on his back. It is believed that this will cause the flax crop to wave in the wind. (p.10)

In the interior of Sumatra the rice is sown by women who, in sowing, let their hair hang loose down their back, in order that the rice may grow luxuriantly and have long stalks. (p.10)

These illustrations also provide the general pattern of explanation that Frazer has in mind. The activity alludes via symbolism to a property of the object under consideration, and understanding the example means understanding the relationship between the activity and the intended property.

But Frazer is quite right that this use of symbolism in sympathetic magic is fundamentally instrumental; it is not itself pointing to a separate agency.

Thus we see that in sympathetic magic one event is supposed to be followed necessarily and invariably by another, without the intervention of any spiritual or personal agency. This is, in fact, the modern conception of physical causation; the conception, indeed, is misapplied, but it is there none the less [sic RCK]. Here, then, we have another mode in which primitive man seeks to bend nature to his wishes. (p.12)

This also elucidates that Frazer considers the motives to be primarily influence over social--e.g. enemies; cf (pp.11f)---and especially natural phenomena:

 Of all natural phenomena there are perhaps none which civilised man feels himself more powerless to influence than the rain, the sun, and the wind. Yet all these are commonly supposed by savages to be in some degree under their control. (p.13)

Frazer of course knows his examples too well to make the mistake of drawing the lines too clearly between sympathetic magic and supernatural agency (p.12), and will comment on this problem when looking at specific examples:

The Fountain of Baranton ... in the forest of Brecilien, used to be resorted to by peasants when they needed rain; they caught some of the water in a tankard and threw it on a slab near the spring [i.e. sympathetic magic]. (p.15)

In a Samoan village a certain stone was carefully housed as the representative of the rain-making god [i.e. supernatural agency RCK];  and in time of drought his priests carried the stone in procession, and dipped it in a stream. (p.14)

There is a lonely tarn on Snowdon called Dulyn or the Black Lake, lying "in a dismal dingle surrounded by high and dangerous rocks." A row of stepping stones runs out into the lake; and if any one steps on the stones and throws water so as to wet the farthest stone, which is called the Red Altar, "it is but a chance that you do not get rain before night, even when it is hot weather." In these cases it is probable that, as in Samoa, the stone is regarded as in some sort divine. (p.15)

In Navarre the image of St Peter was taken to a river, where some prayed for him to rain, but others called out to duck him in the water. Here the dipping in || the water is used as a threat; but originally it was probably a sympathetic charm .... (pp.15f)

Thus, explanation needs not only pay attention to the action as such, but also to the intended form of influence being exerted: is there a supernatural agency involved, which is threatened, propitiated, or merely leveraged---compare the New Caledonian ancestor represented through a dug-up skeleton, who functions as a conduit to the sky, i.e. "They [the New Caledonian rain makers, RCK] supposed that the soul of the departed took up the water, made rain of it, and showered it down again." (p.16)
Or is a non-agentive entity leveraged as part of the symbolism. The Servian girl turned into the Dodola--a fertility goddess dressed in grass, herbs and flowers only--does not herself become divine in the process (p.16), though she represents the "spirit of vegetation" and the drenching with water is imitative of rain. In a lurch, a passing stranger will do as a visiting god or spirit (p.17) and be treated as such (p.16).

The problem of explanation remains that not all aspects of a ceremony may be elucidated in this fashion in all cases. Consider the scenario of the floating harrow.

In the district of Transylvania, when the ground is parched with drought, some girls strip themselves naked, and, led by an older woman, who is also naked, they steal a harrow and carry it across the field to a brook, where they set it afloat. Next they sit on the harrow and keep a tiny flame burning on each corner of it for an hour. Then they leave the harrow in the water and go home. (p.17)

We already have some of the infrastructure to suggest pieces for the interpretation. Naked women symbolize spirits, and the cultural implement put into the water expresses the need of the parched ground for rain. However, it is unclear what the flames burning on the corners (they have to be tiny because the harrow is most likely wooden) and the hour of floating in the brook is supposed to accomplish. Is the carrying of the harrow over the field from the to the brook part of the ritual or part of the description? Is the age difference between the leadership and the performers ritually relevant (wisdom vs fertility) or pragmatic (someone needs to know what to do, but is too old to do it themselves)? Thus, there are different levels of matching quality that need to be kept in mind. (The rainmaking ceremony of the Diyerie of South Australia, with its bleeding and large stones and putting the stones into the trees fifteen miles or more away is another case with oddities; cf. (p.20).)

Sometimes even the experts cannot agree.

A peculiar mode of making rain was adopted by the heathen Arabs. They tied two sorts of bushes to the tails and hind-legs of their cattle, and setting fire to the bushes drove the cattle to the top of a mountain, praying for rain. This may be, as Wellhausen suggests, an imitation of lightning on the horizon. But it may also be a way of threatening the sky .... (p.20) 

Frazer gives the example of West-African rain-makers threatening the sky with fire (p.20).

Keeping tabs on Frazer

I have begun putting together the bits and pieces for my next research undertaking. I want to see if the inductive argument in Sir Frazer's Golden Bough (Vol 1, Vol 2 from 1894) is plausible.

Specifically, we want to verify Frazer's argument by encoding all of the ethnographic literature that he piles up and then seeing

• if the model selection algorithm that he uses can find the argument that he makes from the cases that he presents (internal validity)
• if the model selection algorithm that he uses finds other arguments as well, using the same case material (internal decisiveness)
• in the case of model ambiguity, whether Frazer selected the best model, most likely in the minimal-message reformulated sense of Ockham's Razor (internal conciseness)

More on what we mean by model selection in a future post.

This is distinct from showing that Frazer's argument is consistent with current or even past research agendas (communal validity). In fact, few today will share his assumptions about the uniformity of religious belief of an Aryan Race, which entails

... every inquiry into the primitive religion of the Aryans should either start from the superstitious beliefs and observances of the peasantry, or should at least be constantly checked and controlled by reference to them. (Preface, p.viii, ed. 1894)

Frazer himself uses this stance to downplay the reports in the old literature vis-a-vis the cultural context in which the non-literate peasantry has been reared.

... and so it has come about that in Europe at the present day the superstitious beliefs and practices which have been handed | down by word of mouth are generally of a far more archaic type than the religion depicted in the most ancient literature of the Aryan race. (p.viiif)

The idea for the title so far has been "The Logic of Sympathetic Magic: Taking a Leaf from Frazer's Golden Bough". I think it's funny, too.

Modern Counters to Bruce Malina

As was recently pointed out to me, even the updated version (3rd edition from 2002) of Bruce Malina's work has its issues and counter-arguments. Specifically, U. Bockmuehl of Cambrdige wrote in a review (in 2002):

Nonetheless, after more than two decades of remarkable popularity, the book's re-release does invite a number of critical reflections. First, for a third edition this book remains surprisingly unpolished in some respects. Typos old and new continue; so does a prose style that borders at times on the trite and repetitive -- even when allowing for undergraduate attention spans. There still is no comprehensive bibliography and no index of modern authors, so that specific references remain difficult to find. Although updated, the chapter bibliographies still suggest inadequate interaction with anthropological approaches critical of the author's own. While this may be understandable in a pioneering work that first brought the insights of cultural anthropology to the table of New Testament studies, in a third edition one might like to see a more nuanced picture. A good deal of recent classical scholarship on honour and shame, some of it rather critical of J.G. Peristiany's and J. Pitt-Rivers' old view that these 'pivotal values' governed every social transaction in the 'Mediterranean' world, is simply not cited here (e.g. B. Williams, Shame and Necessity (1993); D.L. Cairns, Aidos (1993); M. Herzfeld and M.A. Marcus in D.D. Gilmmore (ed.), Honor and Shame (1987)). It is instructive to look up the recent edition of the Oxford Classical Dictionary under the relevant headings. 

As a result, astounding generalizations proliferate, seemingly unsupported by evidence and reminiscent of grand anthropological theories of a bygone day, when Polynesian cargo cults could be thought to shed the same inexhaustible light on the social realities of Steeple Bumpstead as of ancient Xanadu. We hear about what is characteristically, and it appears timelessly, 'Mediterranean' behaviour. But for every valid or at least plausible insight one stumbles over others burdened with rather too many unmentioned exceptions, be they ancient or modern or both. All the while, the cultural stereotypes merrily accumulate to an extent that would be unthinkable if the object were contemporary 'African' or 'native American' people groups. The Index of Ancient Authors is remarkably underpopulated for a book of such tall claims; and readers who, like the present author, come to the study of the New Testament from that of the classical world may well scratch their heads to find all ancient (and modern?) inhabitants of the Mediterranean basin thrown into the one cultural melting pot, as if Parthians, Carthaginians and Iberians all subscribed to exactly the same social dynamics and assumptions. A reader of Tacitus or Juvenal would find that Romans easily recognized major anthropological differences between themselves, the Greeks and the diverse barbarians and Scythians who inhabited the wider orbit of mare nostrum. What is more, they had a particular revulsion for Oriental cultures and customs -- especially Jewish ones. 

And it is Jews, after all, whose role in the 'New Testament world' arguably matters more than most. Both in their own eyes and in those of their pagan critics, they were culturally unique. Little of that distinctness, however, comes into the fore in this book. Malina refers to ancient Jews and their literature in curiously arm-waving and unspecific terms ('Semites', 'Semitic subculture', 'Ben Zakaiists', 'late Israelites'), citing the Mishnah only twice and the Dead Sea Scrolls not at all, and virtually ignoring the first-century role of the Pharisees, who (rather than the priests) were in Josephus's view the real 'bearers of the Great Tradition'. A good many of Malina's cultural generalizations are plainly untrue for the followers of Jesus and for some or indeed most other religious Jews. For example, individual decision rather than family ties did matter for Jesus and at Qumran; Jews did not believe that 'stars were living beings, intelligent and powerful'; they did not wear tassels on their garments primarily to ward off the evil eye; at least the Dead Sea sect did prohibit marriage with nieces and cousins; 'Ben Zakaiists' (i.e. rabbis) did not develop 'a viable Israelite domestic religion... largely through interaction with post-Jesus groups' (i.e. Christians). And so forth. Exaggerated claims for a homogeneous and apparently timeless Mediterranean culture seriously compromise the anthropological and historical applicability of Malina's model to the highly specific and unusual context of religious first-century Palestinian Judaism. The contention that public honour and status mattered supremely to the elites of places like Corinth or Ephesus is at least plausible. The Palestinian Jewish 'New Testament world', however, was in fact a culture in which many, not least in the Jesus movement, prized humility more highly than secular conventions of honour, and saw social status and influence in a frame of reference that prioritised divine revelation and the judgment of the world to come.

Some of the criticism is not specific to Malina, but to his larger camp of co-researchers, the CONTEXT group that he belongs to. Zeba A. Crook of Carleton University, in her review of TODD D. STILL and DAVID G. HORRELL (eds.), After the First Urban Christians: The Social-Scientific Study of Pauline Christianity Twenty-Five Years Later (London/New York: Clark, 2009), points out that the Horrell especially, in the introductory methodological essay, criticizes Malina's hard distinction: 

Arguing against Bruce Malina’s strongly articulated distinction (The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology [Atlanta: John Knox, 1981]), and taking his cue from two recent social-science works—one by a sociologist, Grace Davie (Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000]), the other [p. 441] by an anthropologist, David E. Sutton (Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory [Oxford: Berg, 2001])—H. claims that the distinction between social description and social-scientific criticism is no longer sustainable and is not actually reflected in current work.

Crook disagrees with the assessment, but agrees that a revamping of Malina using newer literature is in order.

Goodbye to le temps médiane

I am not almost completely convinced that the temps médiane is not to be found in Braudel's work because he actually does not care about the temporal duration at all.

What he cares about is the predictive value of the temporal categories; that is why the other category is the business cycles, where each iteration is short in temporal extension, but their re-occurrence makes them akin to la longue durée in that way.

Thus, there is maybe then not much point in being able to sort them in their duration, especially tracing them backward. It is at any rate not a lesson that Braudel wished to teach (whether it be interesting or not is a separate question).

This explains why the tracing felt like such a big waste of time emotionally, because it was unclear what it would contribute. Rather there is the general task of establishing the temporal bounds with respect to a specific degree of conceptual abstraction (to generate the identity that permits the comparison).

If we have a temporal problem that exhibits the pattern that we have [start,end] constraining the years of interest, it is hardly helpful to know that start-t or end+t still exhibited the phenomenon—without some analogizing or justificatory explanation, that is.

Rather the question is, does the problem exhibit stability during the time period. If we presume that this is an issue that has stable duration for the bounds in question, then there should be no variability; if we presume that it belongs to the cyclical patterns, then we should assume that we may have variance, but the plotting the "rise and fall" of the value in question will reveal additional useful information.

Whether the problem has stability or not allows us to settle the foreground -- background issue, and gives contour to the explanations or reconstructions in that fashion. The stability of course need not have been obvious to the participants, and the cyclical natures may not have been either.

reconceptualizing the project structure

After working on extracting events that describe cases of mobility, financing, persecution and apocalyptic thinking from the sources, it now becomes possible to reconceptualize the presentation structure.

1. Introduction
2. Event Data Set Presentation
3. Planned Dimension I: Mobility
4. Planned Dimension II: Economy
5. Planned Dimension III: Urbanization
6. Discovered Dimension IV: Social Trust
7. Mediterranean Model Hunting
8. Application: The Mormon War of 1838
9. Evaluation & Conclusion

Notice that social trust was a dimension whose importance was only discovered in the analysis of the three planned dimensions of mobility, economy and urbanization. But it becomes a key component of understanding the alienation felt between the LDS and the gentile communities, which finds expression and reinforcement in repeated evictions.

La Longue Durée and Petitio Principii

After both the analysis of the Ur-Matriarchy and the discussions regarding the restructuring of the dissertation project, I have begun to think about the Braudelian Longue Durée as the moral equivalent of a petitio principii, in that in many instances, including some that Braudel applies in his book on the Mediterranean, the unchanging nature of the historical structure is assumed rather than demonstrated, thus undermining the quality of the argument.

Furthermore, as the micro-historical turn would suggest, a detailed analysis of the assumed longue durée would discover both variability within the structure across time and would suggest less Procrustian research paths whose questions cannot be suggested up front; more research into Danto's observations regarding the "Monassian rule problem" is required to firm up thinking here.

Thus, it might be that the trichotomy of longue, médian and court re-collapses to the distinction of event and structure well-attested with German historiographical tradition (e.g. Reinhart Koselleck). This is not to deny that post-facto of the historical reconstruction, the structures can be sorted temporally by their duration, which is independently useful, providing terminus ante and post quem information. But unless the work has been done up front, it cannot be presupposed for the argument.

Rather, the claim will have to be weaker, i.e. that in a specific historical reconstruction, a specific structure turned out to be temporally stable across a long, medium or short range of time--with no claim how that would play out in alternate settings, reconstructions, in the future, or for even the same topic assuming additional research work. It is an empirical argument, and can be swayed by a single counter example, not an analytic category. It is a werksimmanente Eigenschaft.

As a research strategy, it will be permissible to assume that a specific temporal structure might be of long duration, but that has the quality of a heuristic and not of a binding assumption.

Furthermore, it stands to reason that the longer the duration of a temporal structure, the higher the probability that its duration will be invalidated by an event.

The Term Culture in Archaeology

In her book

Röder, Brigitte, Hummel, Juliane, Kunz, Brigitte: Göttinnendämmerung, 1996 (München : Droemer Knaur), ISBN: 3-426-26887-6

Juliane Hummel points out (p.172) that while culture is a concept that for existing societies includes non-material aspects such as belief systems or social conventions, while for archaeology the term is restricted to the material remains and is used in a very circumscribed sense.

Wie diese Beispiele [i.e. Linearbandkeramische Kultur, Horgener Kultur, etc] zeigen, ist der Kulturbegriff in der Archäologie sehr eingeschränkt. Er dient in erster Linie als Arbeitstitel für die fachinterne Verständigung und ist als Sammelbezeichnung für räumlich-zeitlich übereinstimmende archäologische Quellen zu verstehen, wobei der Grund der Übereinstimmung jeweils zu klären ist (Wotzka 1993, 25ff). [p.173]

As these examples show [e.g. Linear band ceramics culture, Horgener Kultur, etc], the term 'culture' is very restricted in archaeology. It serves primarily as a working title for internal communication and is a collective term for spatio-temporally agreeing archaeological sources, where the reason for the agreement requires explanation (Wotzka 1993, 25ff). [p.173]

Since the archaeological sources are restricted to material objects, the notion of culture cannot include "living things" such as conceptualizations.

Eine archäologische Kultur ist strenggenommen eine "tote Kultur" (Eggers 1986, 258). [p.173]

An archaeological culture is essentially a "dead culture" (Eggers 1986, 258). [p.173]

And this means that some of the questions laypeople are most interested in cannot be covered by the archaeological term of culture.

Da die archäologische Kultur ausschließlich über die materiellen Hinterlassenschaften einer Gemeinschaft verfügt, betrachtet sie lediglich einen Ausschnitt der ehemals "lebenden Kultur" .... Die "lebende Kultur" einer Menschengruppe umfaßt alles, was dort erdacht und geschaffen sowie sozial akzeptiert oder geduldet ist. Materielle Gegenstände, z.B. Werkzeuge, gehören ebenso dazu wie nicht-materielle Inhalte, etwa religiöse Vorstellungen, Rechtsnormen oder geschlechtsspezifische Verhaltensregeln (Rudolph 1988, 43). [p.173]

Since archaeological culture only has available the material remains of a society, the term only captures a slice of the then-existing "living culture" .... The "living culture" of a group of people includes everything that was conceived or created there, socially accepted or tolerated. Material remains, for example tools, belong into that as well as non-material contents, such as religious ideas, norms of law or gendered rules of conduct (Rudolph 1988, 43). [p.173]

This subtle distinction between "living culture" and "dead culture" foils some of the interpretative attempts that people make with respect to archaeological knowledge.

Ob die Menschen einer archäologischen Kultur, wie etwa Marija Gimbutas annimmt, sich selbst als Gemeinschaft verstanden, eine gemeinsame Sprache benützten, die gleichen religiösen Vorstellungen hatten -- kurz: ob sich die einzelnen Gruppenmitglieder als ein 'Volk' subjektiv zusammengehörig fühlten, darüber sagt der archäologische Kulturbegriff nichts aus. [p.174]

Whether the people of an archaeological culture, as Marija Gimbutas assumes, saw themselves as a society, used a common Language, shared religious conceptualizations -- in short, whether the individual members of the group felt subjectively as belonging together as a 'people', is a discussion that the archaeological sense of culture cannot contribute to. [p.174]

Ian Gregory on Maps as Bad Graphs

I strongly suspect that I completely agree with the sentiment of Ian Gregory implied by the title

Gregory I.N. (2008) “‘A map is just a bad graph:’ Why spatial statistics are important in historical GIS” in Knowles A.K. (ed.) Placing History: How maps, spatial data and GIS are changing historical scholarship. ESRI Press: Redlands CA. pp. 123-149

In fact, walking back from the Institute for European Ethnology yesterday, where I had picked up a copy of Henri Lefebvre's Production of Space, I was thinking the same thing. But boy, is it difficult to get a hold of that article.

Possible Stratifications of early Mormon History

If we want to apply Braudel's conceptualization framework, suitably updated, to the rise of Mormonism in upstate New York, Ohio, Illinois and Missouri, then we need to identify the separate temporal strata of the context in which the event history plays out. This is equivalent to asking what would be in the three "parts" of our The American North during the Life of Joseph Smith Jr, if the parody be permitted.

One of the exciting aspects of taking this tack is that concept of la longue durée is potentially best applied not to the geographical features, but to those of the history of mentalities. Specifically, the continued presence of Gnostic and Hermetic traditions in Mormon cosmology is well worked out, as is the presence of folk magic and treasure hunting--two traditions that stack up as if internally segregated parts of la longue durée (given the temporal limits on Spanish colonization on the American continent).

Other mentalities, themselves with significant durations, were just coming to an end. While during Joseph Smith Jr's lifetime, methodism was still a rebellious new religious movement for the New Yorkers, it would soon settle and become part of the religious establishment, akin to the way 21st century Baptism has become to be equated with conservatism in the continental US of A (esp. in the South).

Alternatively, the specifics of geography were experiencing massive revision during the time. The Erie canal, completed during this time and visible from Joseph Smith Jr's home in Palmyra, fundamentally changed the context of the Great Lake region; the beginning of a longue durée comparable to an earth quake changing a regional hydrology. The rise of the steamboats on the Ohio river, exemplified by their early adoption during the Mormon time in Nauvoo, also form part of this backdrop of establishing new patterns with significant continuation (in 2011, 14.3 million tons of goods worth 6 billion US$ moved through the state of Ohio via the Erie Canal and the Ohio river).

As innovative as Joseph Smith Jr, Oliver Cowley and the other thinkers of the early Mormon church were in working out their relationship with the Christian tradition, they drew on local patterns of settlement, farming practice, commerce and banking, music and entertainment, policing and military organization. These patterns belong to la duree médiane, so they not date back to even older times.
They also drew on the rich organizational experience of religious communities, be they the Carians or some of the Pietistic prophetic groups in northern Pennsylvania that Smith Jr and Cowley were familiar with since their youth.
There was "sectarian know-how" here that the rising Mormon church took advantage of, continuously.