aegagrus's reviews
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This early work of Stein's is an edited and translated version of the doctoral dissertation she completed under Edmund Husserl in 1916, which is to say that she was not writing for a general audience. My own familiarity with German phenomenology is limited, and while I could almost always follow Stein's general argument, I certainly misinterpreted or missed significant aspects of her commentary or reasoning. 

Having said that, Stein's conception of empathy resonates extremely deeply with me. Stein argues that empathy cannot be understood as imitation, ideation, outward perception, or propositional knowledge. Instead, she considers empathy a sui generis "experience of being lead by the foreign experience". Her crucial insight is to analogize empathy to memory, expectation, and fantasy, experiences which are themselves "primordially given" while being "non-primordial in content". That is, these are states we directly experience, even though the content of our memories or expectations or fantasies is mediated, rather than primordial. Empathy, however, differs from these experiences by combining the primordial presence of a foreign experience with an awareness of separateness. Relevantly, this implies that empathy is not simply "putting ourselves in another's shoes", suppressing the consciousness of our separateness to imagine another's world. Stein writes that this may be a strategy to prompt or engender empathy, but it is not in itself empathy, which is distinct from mere imagination. 

Stein saw her account of empathy as necessitating an account of personhood, and began to develop such an account, a theme she would return to in later work. Building on other phenomenologists, she describes the experience of personhood as an orientation around a physical and spiritual "zero-point of orientation". Applying this to empathy, she describes how empathy can be understood as becoming aware of (which is to say, being lead by) the presence of a foreign zero-point. While some might object to the mystical tone of this argument, to me it represents a useful framework for capturing what empathy is, how it can be developed and practiced, and how it can help us examine our own identities, all of which Stein discusses. 

I spend a lot of time thinking about empathy, in part because I believe that many people I otherwise agree with ethically and politically have become convinced of its meaningful impossibility, a position I consider deeply misguided. While Stein's investigation of empathy is academic, and sometimes difficult to penetrate, I find her account of empathy is not only an appropriate rejoinder to many anti-empathetic arguments but also the best description I have yet encountered of empathy's presence in my own life. Stein's framework allows for fruitful further development of ideas related to the balance between physical embodiment and empathetic personhood, the relationship between empathy and storytelling, and the active force with which empathy "leads" us to some previously unrealized terminus. 

All in all, these ideas will continue to be extremely important to me, even if I would love to find an annotated version for any future encounters with this text. 

See also: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14zv0c7cQmo

Penguin's 2019 paperback edition of The Left Hand of Darkness commemorates the celebrated novel's 50th anniversary. Among the testimonials printed on the back cover, from The Guardian: "A quietly revolutionary study in gender." This assessment intrigues me.

To be sure, the novel revolves around the cultural disconnect between Gethen, a world without sexual dimorphism or fixed gender, and "bisexual" (i.e. sexually dimorphic) worlds, including our own. Our two narrators are the Terran envoy Genly Ai and the Gethenian nobleman (politician?) Estraven. Each narrator's voice is compellingly nuanced. Ai is ignorant of and oblivious to much, but self-consciously so. Being aware of ignorance in an unfamiliar cultural setting doesn't necessarily improve one's ability to operate in spite of it; in some cases Ai's constant rumination on ignorance leads him to his most ill-advised judgements. Estraven, meanwhile, seems a quintessential statesman: blessed with clarity of forethought and decisive judgement, but laden with an almost somber sense of his limited power over the currents of history (the choice of pronouns being Le Guin's).

Our narrators are complex and thoughtful people, and Le Guin is good at world-building, paying attention to Gethenian culture, politics, climate, and history, along with their androgynous life-cycles. As a consequence, it is seldom entirely clear how essential the question of gender is to the difficulties Ai and Estraven have in understanding one another. They speculate as to its potential influence on each other's actions or worldview, but cannot do more than speculate. In truth, Le Guin's story is rich enough that her protagonists might equally misapprehend one another without physiological difference. The ambiguity is important and fruitful; we learn a lot more by never having the historical impact of gender explicitly settled. However, it is hard not to wonder how "revolutionary" this all is, if politics and weather and so on are equally important drivers of the novel's plot.

Further compounding things, Ai's attitudes towards gender seem quite tethered to 1969, the year of the novel's original publication. For today's reader this can be odd, although it certainly does make the cultural difference at play more obvious or more extreme. But as Charlie Jane Anders notes in the 2019 edition's afterword, Le Guin isn't actually questioning biological essentialism at all: the Gethenians' society only differs insofar as their biology differs, and all of her characters, in their own ways, draw fairly straight lines between biology and what we would call gender. So, in what ways does The Left Hand offer anything revolutionary?

I think the answer is also to be found in Jane Anders' afterword. Anders notes that "unresolved sexual tension" is a fundamental and productive force throughout the novel, and it's true. Not only is the moment of greatest mutual understanding between Ai and Estraven brought about

by Estraven entering  kemmer (a cyclical estrous state)

during their shared odyssey

across the Great Continent's ice shelf

, but the trust Estraven places in the extraterrestrial Ai, and the pair's complex but strong impulses towards one another, ultimately represent a vague and unrealized eroticism (as they themselves will realize). In this way, The Left Hand of Darkness seems, to me, more of a "quietly revolutionary" study in sexuality, than in gender -- a thought experiment about the latent sexual forces that play unexpected social roles as society changes and diversifies. 

David Mitchell's foreward cites loved ones' "benign transphobia" as an example of the kind of cultural difference Le Guin writes about overcoming, and he's not entirely wrong. There are moments of kindness and solidarity in the face of difference

-- the most touching, for me, was Ai's ability to share meaningful space and time with a dying Gethenian convict in a prison camp, the pair brought together by circumstance and almost entirely incapable of understanding each other.

But I'll remember this book more following Anders' train of thought than Mitchell's. 

All of that being said, it's quite good. Le Guin's thought-provoking Author's Note, first published in 1976, is an added delight. 

Hämäläinen's project here is very much grounded in political and diplomatic history, and as such may for some readers seem to have a bit of a musty, antique aura. Taken on its own terms, I think this book succeeds at a lot of things. Hämäläinen is very good at describing geographical space using concepts like technological and ecological frontiers, buffer zones and areas of effective control, and demographic fracture/displacement/migration to thoroughly redraw the map of the political realities of the North American interior in the 17th-19th centuries; for those of us still laboring under the weight of the conventional maps and boundaries we memorized in high school, this may be his most valuable contribution. He is also successful in giving a striking account of Lakota governance over time, describing a fluid political order which underwent many changes as the Lakota detached themselves from the eastern Sioux nations near the Great Lakes, consolidated themselves in the Missouri River valley, adapted to a new environment and carved out an extensive sphere of influence in the plains, and continued to drift northward and westward when confrontation with the post-civil war United States reached its peak.  Hämäläinen also emphasizes the long time-horizons under which the Lakota strategic vision operated and makes good account of the role of ecological resources, namely game. Finally, I think Hämäläinen strikes a good balance in devoting roughly equal attention to Lakota-US/European relations and intra-indigenous relations, understood as influencing one another but never fully blending into one another (at least not until the very end).

Although the earlier portions of Lakota America are interesting, and essential to the story of geographic drift, the actual historical inquiry feels stronger towards the latter half of the book, in which Hämäläinen is able to draw more extensively on Lakota sources (namely Winter Counts) and clearly describe the differing inclinations and political/diplomatic strategies of individual Lakota leaders (especially Red Cloud, Spotted Tail, and Sitting Bull). The earlier history, which seems to rely more on frontier narratives, is useful, but the source material available does limit my ability to fully credit all of Hämäläinen's proposals or interpretations.

Although I haven't been able to find as many grassroots Lakota responses to Hämäläinen's book as I would like, one point of controversy in its reception has been Hämäläinen's use of the term "empire" to describe the polity created by Lakota after migrating westward from a more condensed area in the Missouri and Minnesota river valleys. The term "empire" is worth problematizing; Lakota expansionary warfare against Crows, Shoshone, and others notwithstanding, the historical context in which the Lakota polity arose and operated was very distinct from the context in which "empires" of settler-colonialism constituted themselves. Ultimately, I don't think Hämäläinen is particularly interested in wading into this conceptual issue; he seems to be using the term "empire" mostly as a shorthand indicating extensive territorial power and diplomatic/strategic/historical agency (and because he used the term "empire" in regards to Comanche history in his previous book). I think Hämäläinen's discussion of the Lakota polity is specific enough that the word is unnecessary, and that he might have avoided valid concerns towards the political implications of his work by omitting it.

Lakota America moves at a measured, detail-oriented pace until reaching the Battle of Little Bighorn. After the Battle, Hämäläinen wraps up quickly, describing the final subjugation of Lakota power in the 1880s and 1890s in much scantier detail before adding a welcome but somewhat halfhearted epilogue about Lakota presence in contemporary struggles for Native American sovereignty from the AIM/Red Power movements to Standing Rock. I don't think choosing to end his core historical work at Little Bighorn is a problem; Hämäläinen's interest is the sociopolitical and geopolitical evolution of sovereign Lakota power in the American interior, and Little Bighorn is a valid end point for this story. Still, some readers may find a stronger conclusion wanting. 

Dunlap's title, "Shelter Theology", is an effective bit of marketing but a misleading way to sum up her book. Fortunately, once I readjusted my expectations, I found a great deal of valuable insight here. 

At its heart, this is a book about the pastoral difficulties associated with ministering to people whose religious lives are very different from your own. Dunlap recounts her experiences working as a chaplain at an emergency shelter in Durham, NC. She describes the ways in which her own pastoral training prioritized listening, empathy, accompaniment, and subtle theological interpretations which didn't offend a modernist and scientific view of the world. These pastoral instincts often proved to be at odds with the spiritual needs of those attending prayer services in the shelter. Predominantly Black and steeped in various Low Church traditions, the attendees valued oratory and testimony which directly called upon familiar scriptural and proverbial source material, affirmed the active presence of God and the Devil in the material world, and was often driven to theodicy and the presence of divine meaning in personal narrative. Dunlap reflects on the life-sustaining force of these forms of religious expression and belief, letting her interviewees speak for themselves by reproducing their narratives at length. She finds wisdom in their practical theologies, but also asks open-ended questions. Most interestingly, she acknowledges that she herself will never be able to tap into their religious modalities in an authentic way, and reflects on the ways in which she can use her social and educational capital to create, facilitate, or sustain spaces in which peer-to-peer ministry and encouragement is possible. 

Dunlap's book, then, is not primarily a theological account of the condition of being unhoused, or even a sociological account of unhoused peoples' religious practice in general. Indeed, when it comes closest to this territory -- in its first and last chapters -- it is at its weakest and most superficial. Dunlap's book is closer to a personal reflection on the experience of running a non-denominational prayer service at a shelter in North Carolina, the stories and narratives that shelter's residents shared with her, and the changing ways in which she came to understand and carry out her role as chaplain. It is on this basis that those interested in pastoral practice may benefit quite substantially from this book, especially when working with religious forms and/or content which may be unfamiliar or uncomfortable. 

Newland Archer bridles at social convention, but can only muster impotent resistance; he is clear-eyed but feckless. Ellen Olenska uses her outsider status shrewdly, never quite letting on how much or how little she understands New York's genteel society, but is ultimately imprisoned in her gambit. Newland and Ellen are fascinating characters in their own rights, and their frustrated relationship is at the core of The Age of Innocence. Their interactions with and feelings towards one another are endlessly compelling. 

Wharton deserves further praise for her memorable secondary characters -- the mischievous elderly Catherine Mingott is a particular gem -- and the sophisticated emotional note on which her story ends -- calm, elegiac, bittersweet. Readers today will also be intrigued by the degree to which the New York gentry she depicts are still living in the shadow of Europe, sometimes imitating and sometimes drawing a contrast, but always conscious of their society's immaturity -- innocence -- relative to old world aristocracies. 

May Welland was, to me, the one significant character to whom Wharton could have been more generous. She serves well as a conceptual foil, through which Wharton is able to depict some of the subtle but powerful ways traditional New York society managed to reproduce itself. One almost feels, however, that she exists as a functional element for storytelling and point-making, more than as a fully realized human character. It is worth noting, though, that our understanding of May is filtered through Archer's, to which some of these deficiencies can be attributed. 

Negrophilia explores the relationships between Black people, Black art, and the white Avant Garde movements which flourished in 1920s Paris. Those who claimed to reject Western modernity (Dadaists, Surrealists, and others) saw Blackness and Black culture as a potent aesthetic language, a reservoir of "primitive" vitality, or an instrument for subverting the established ethical and cultural order. Such Primitivism was always founded upon racist stereotypes, but Archer-Straw is attentive to the nuanced and contradictory ways in which both white 'negrohiles' and Black Parisians (many of them American expatriates) navigated these cultural currents. Her assessments of individual personalities are critical but fair. Moreover, her narrow geographical and temporal focus allows her to address both direct encounters/relationships and diffuse cultural trends, providing important context to her individual examples.

Negrophilia's greatest strength is its images, which are fascinating, often quite affecting, and very effectively integrated into the text's natural flow. Academic writing often groans under a rigid argumentative structure; the writing here feels more narrative-driven, progressing through different case studies and examples and examining each on its own terms. While this approach allows for the images' smooth integration and is very readable, I do believe the project would have benefitted from a clearer argumentative structure in which the author spent more time explicitly addressing the ways in which each chapter contributes to or develops her overall theses. 

My central critique of this book is that T. M. Luhrmann spins a relatively specific intervention in the fields of anthropology and ethnography into an excessively general discourse on the phenomenology of religion. 

The initial intervention runs as follows. For many years, anthropologists and others wrote about non-western religiosity in terms of irrationality; what were the cultural factors that caused people to (wrongly) believe non-rational things about the world? A new generation of anthropologists endeavored to take non-western peoples' beliefs more seriously, leading to an ontological turn in which these beliefs were considered to be a "real" and functional part of their cultural environments. The problem, Luhrmann notes, is that some have overcorrected and now claim that, "belief" as such being a Western concept, there is no distinction in other cultures between what someone "knows" about the material world and what they "believe" about the spiritual world. Luhrmann persuasively argues that this type of rhetoric flattens the way in which non-western people are said to understand the world, denying their capacity to build "flexible ontologies" and failing to account for the observed fact that people everywhere in the world interact with and account for spiritual entities differently than they interact with material ones. 

This argument is well-taken. From here, Luhrmann moves into a discussion of the ways in which people make their relationships with invisible others feel Real (which, she notes, is inherently something that takes work). Her comparison with play is instructive; children are able to track parallel realities in great detail, substituting a bit of play-dough for a doll's nighttime snack (Luhrmann's example), but they are not actually surprised when the play-dough remains uneaten come morning. Luhrmann describes various elements of religious life such as prayer, confession, and "inward cultivation" in terms of people of faith practicing being attentive to mystical experiences, learning how to narrativize their lives, and building compelling and dynamic relationships with their God or gods. 

The strength of Luhrmann's analysis here is the personal experiences on which she is able to draw. She has been many places and talked to many people, and is able to compellingly relate stories of her interactions with evangelical Christians on three continents, practitioners of Santeria and Western Occultism, newly-observant Hasidim, and others. 

However, there are in my opinion several issues with the broader scope of Luhrmann's work. First, although her qualitative experiences are illuminating, many of her methods seem likely to uncover what she starts out expecting to uncover. Second, the general discussions of religious phenomenology seem somewhat basic in that field, while the specific discussion of the faultiness of the ontological turn in ethnography somewhat falls by the wayside, as Luhrmann has not done the right fieldwork to truly expand upon her insight there. The last chapter in particular, in which Luhrmann reflects upon the interactive nature of spiritual relationships, seems somewhat unoriginal in the field of comparative religion. Finally, Luhrmann's comparison of "bodily" religious responses among Charismatic Christians in the US, India, and Ghana, raises some eyebrows by the loose way in which Luhrmann uses insights about "cultural differences" from earlier literature (despite criticizing the impressionistic nature of some of that very literature earlier). 

 Empire of Dreams is an immersive postmodern dreamscape. Braschi’s writing is urgent, propulsive. She writes and thinks and dreams and declaims with an almost-erotic desperation, burning through a landscape of memory and sensation and truth and lies. Motifs and symbols appear unexpectedly, but develop and return and reinvent themselves; they never seem “random”.  

 

The New York City which circumscribes Braschi’s visions is raucous, rebellious, joyous but never sanitized. The text itself becomes a city, through which Braschi moves in many personas and disguises. The lines between human and nonhuman, diegetic and textual, blur. Travelling from page to page feels like a physical journey, a walk down a New York street buffeted by unexpected encounters of all kinds. It is a fitting milieu in which to experience the swirling contradictions of gender, of ethnicity, of identity and authorship. 

 

Braschi’s writing and the formalisms she employs evolve over the course of this book. Throughout it all, though, these are words that I found myself wanting to hear and to speak out loud, to bellow from a rooftop or a mountaintop or a stage. Even if I found no other value in this work, this quality would remain: Empire of Dreams is simply thrilling to read aloud. The power of Braschi’s voice, and of O’Dwyer’s translation, shines through on each and every page.  

Borofsky's project in Yanomami moves through a number of stages. First, he clearly lays out the basic contours of the controversy under discussion. He profiles the major characters, itemizes the various things Napoleon Chagnon and James Neel stand accused of, and sketches a brief timeline of developments following the publication of Patrick Tierney's book Darkness in El Dorado. Second, he identifies some key issues to keep in mind when moving forward to evaluate the controversy: power differentials, just researcher-informant relationships, and how to locate credibility in these discussions. Third, he devotes a chapter to presenting the perspectives of several Yanomami leaders through excerpted interviews, lightly commenting upon notable throughlines (for instance, the Yanomami concern over blood samples still found in American labs; Borofsky notes that although Yanomami voices do not always agree on how to resolve this situation, it consistently assumes much more importance to them than it seems to hold in the broader academic back-and-forth). Fourth, Borofsky previews the "roundtable" portion of his book, introducing the six experts he has recruited to participate and highlighting the general stances taken in their respective essays. Usefully, a reader could stop here and come away with a good general sense of the discussion that has taken place. Finally, the book concludes with Borofsky's roundtable, taking the form of three rounds of essays in which the participants are asked to respond directly to one another. The multi-round format is important, as different essayists tend to initially focus on different elements of the controversy. The second and third-round essays tend to be a little unwieldy, as the experts try to engage with multiple strands of the debate as it has already occurred. However, as Borofsky notes, if the roundtable had stopped after round one the essayists would have run the risk of talking past one another by each defaulting to a narrow "specialization" (a criticism Borofsky levies against the report produced by the American Anthropological Association's initial task force, which leveraged errors in Tierney's account of Neel's role in the spread of Measels to attempt to dismiss Tierney's other allegations).

Borofsky's own perspective is not entirely absent from his book, but his earnest belief in bringing together divergent scientific perspectives ensures that his own contributions focus mostly on prompting and guiding students who may be asked to wade through the controversy's details. This is certainly a "teaching book"; a classroom or seminar setting is the ideal way in which to engage with this book, especially its roundtable section. As a teacher, Borofsky has one exceptional quality: he expresses earnest and deep admiration for the anthropology students who mobilized to challenge the AAA over its initially dismissive attitude following Tierney's book. It is to these students that Yanomami is dedicated. It is truly refreshing that a scholar trying to move a controversy away from circular partisan recrimination and towards a discussion about how anthropology can be less exploitative believes so deeply that students can and must be at the forefront of change. 

I believe there are two major deficiencies with Borofsky's roundtable. First, although he is to be commended for explicitly including the perspectives of Yanomami leaders and activists, he does so in a separate chapter, rather than as part of the roundtable. I understand the logistical difficulties in  changing this dynamic (some of which Borofsky discusses), but the division remains notable. Second, while his participants cover a wide range of affiliations and perspectives, Napoleon Chagnon himself does not contribute to the discussion. This, to be fair, is entirely Chagnon's fault. His increasing hostility and defensiveness when presented with any opportunity to engage with his critics clearly saddens Borofsky, and remains an impediment to the pursuit of justice among the Yanomami. 

In substantive terms, I came away from this book the most persuaded by Leda Martin's discussion of the concrete ways in which Chagnon's depiction of the Yanomami as "fierce" and violent seeped into Brazilian discourse and contributed to the undermining of Yanomami sovereignty, strengthening the political backers of intruding miners. The response from Raymond Hames, Chagnon's onetime student, feels like question-begging when Hames insists that an anthropologist's objectivity is only useful to a society if the anthropologist is free from worrying about the political ramifications of their work ("useful" how?). The notion of an anthropologist as an objective, detached researcher may be somewhat untenable -- but this is exactly what Yanomami activist Davi Kopenawa has said, describing a model in which those who learn from a community take an active role in "defending" that community. Aside from my appreciation of Borofsky's methodology in constructing this book, this position from Kopenawa forms my strongest lasting impression. 

Reading Edgar Garcia's Emergency, I appreciated his use of the Popol Vuh as an emotional and intellectual resource for times of crisis and transition. Reading Cheerleader's Guide, I appreciated that the same source material (among other sources) became the basis for the gruesome, violent, surreal, and immersive world in which Doris' verses are contained. A creation story is an appropriate venue for themes such as destruction, conflict, group identity, power, and the ever-contingent but nonetheless cyclical-seeming way of the world. So too is a ball game, reenacting some underlying conflict over and over in ways that are both symbolic and real. The 'leaders narrative position, slightly peripheral to these on-field conflicts but very much living in their world brings a grimly gendered angle to what is depicted. 

I was not always sure how the play diagrams were supposed to interact with the text, and I sometimes felt that as a formal device it was more limiting and narrow than the stanzas themselves ended up being and didn't always fit. I would have preferred a different formal device which allowed the reader to live in the team's nightmarish-but-familiar world a little more completely, especially given the sparseness of the written material.