history

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THE DEVIL AND COMMODITY FETISHISM IN SOUTH AMERICA by Michael T. Taussig

Michael T. Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America: Thirtieth Anniversary Edition. University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

Originally published in 1980, I first heard of this book as a recommendation from Max Gladstone. It is an anthropological study – one might call it a Marxist anthropological synthesis – of certain cultural and social practices present in some areas of 1960s and 1970s South America. It focuses in particular on a practice of the “devil bargain” among male agricultural workers, and on practices involving a figure known as the “Tio,” or “uncle,” a devil-like figure, which are carried out by Bolivian tin-miners. Taussig strives to argue from historical cultural context, and makes a strong case for the continuity (and adaptation under new pressures) of historic cultural forms.

This is a complex book, with a strong theoretical focus drawing on Marx, which is not an area in which I’m competent to say much. But it is fascinating read, if at times a difficult one to follow.

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Interesting linky bits

Verso Books, “Judith Butler on Gender and the Trans Experience.”

Harvard Magazine, “The Science of Scarcity: Behaviour and Poverty.”

Irish Times, “Legislation to prevent schools and hospitals discriminating against current or future employees because of their sexuality will be in place by summer.” Good on you, Aodhán Ó Ríordáin, but make sure it’s solid and your colleagues don’t gut it, aye?

Averil Power on the lack of support and vision of her former Fianna Fáil colleagues – including for the marriage equality referendum – in the Irish Independent. Power’s resignation from the party leaves Fianna Fáil’s Oireachtas members with a sad case of Smurfette syndrome.

The Times of Malta on Roman columbaria rediscovered during work on Gozo’s Citadella.

Tansy Rayner Roberts, “‘Fake Geek Girl’ and the Review of Australian Fiction.”

Salon, “Rape in Westeros: What ‘Game of Thrones’ could learn from ‘Mad Max: Fury Road'” – solid.

Jeanne the Fangirl, “A Song of Ice and Fire has a rape problem.”

Do you want to cry happy tears? Watch this:

*pets David Norris* A REPUBLIC OF DIGNITY.

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Ní fhágfar faoin tíorán ná faoin tráill

GANDALF: Theoden king stands alone.
Eomer: Not alone. ROHIRRIM!

Watching #hometovote on Thursday night and Friday, that was how I felt.

On Friday, 22 May 2015, the Irish nation voted overwhelmingly to give equal protection to all persons choosing to marry without distinction as to their sex. It – we – voted to affirm the equality of GLBT citizens in the eyes of the constitution.

Today we watched the returns come in. Today we saw history made. Today, in the crowds in the courtyard of Dublin Castle, cheering when every constituency went green for YES (and booing for Roscommon-South Leitrim, shame on you, you let the side down a bit there), today we began a new history.

I have now heard a crowd break spontaneously into the national anthem.

This is not a thing I ever expected to hear.

But when David Norris spoke a few words to the crowd in that courtyard – a rowdy, cheerful crowd that nonetheless went silent to hear him speak – ending on a note of liberté, egalité, fraternité, everyone. Just. Started.

Buíon dár slua
thar toinn do ráinig chughainn,
Faoi mhóid bheith saor
Seantír ár sinsear feasta,
Ní fhágfar faoin tíorán ná faoin tráill.

I have never in my life seen anything like it. There was a crush just to get in to the courtyard where the screen was bringing up the constituencies as they turned green for Yes. And every time another one went green the roar. Laughing. Crying. Hugging people met randomly. And when Leo Varadkar appeared, a Fine Gael government minister who only came out this year and turned into the most unlikely gay icon of our time… the whole crowd started chanting, “LEO, LEO, LEO.”

One of the highest turnouts for a referendum ever in this country. A landslide in the Dublin constituencies. A two-thirds majority across the country.

Everyone who canvassed. Everyone who came out on national TV, in the newspapers, on doorsteps all over the country, whose courage and compassion and generosity are an example to us all – thank you. Everyone who came #hometovote, that army pouring over the hill – thank you. THANK YOU.

It took me until this year to realise and admit to myself properly that I was bisexual – queer, primarily attracted to women, whatever words are the words that shape the place where a person fits. It took me so long because I was slow to realise it was even possible, much less normal. Much less safe. (My subconscious has some really odd narratives about sex and desire – and I blame being a bastard in nineties Ireland in part for that.)

And now. Now my heart hurts with gladness because this whole bloody country just turned around and said Ah GO ON. Turned out in droves to say Let grá be the law.

It’s in the constitution now, bigots. NO TAKEBACKS.

No, it’s not the end of the road. No, it’s not a panacea. It will not solve quiet social prejudice, or erase Irish homo- and transphobia overnight, or address any number of other problems. But today, Ireland?

TODAY WE ARE LEGENDS WHO MADE HISTORY.

(And I was there to see it.)

What a day. O what a LOVELY day.

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Links du jour

From the Guardian: Murdered on the streets of Karachi: my friend who dared to believe in free speech.

From the Guardian, again: Cremated human bones in pot found in Crossrail dig. (I wouldn’t say “gruesome” ritual. Puzzling, maybe.)

From the Irish Times: It’s hard to accept yourself when your country doesn’t. (The one thing I like about the campaigning for this referendum is that it is making me feel as though Ireland is full of queer people, queer women, where before I didn’t… quite… believe that we were normal? – Yes, I’m getting used to using the word “we” when it comes to queer women. Took me a very long while to get comfortable with that.)

From the blog Per Lineam Valli (Along the Line of the Wall), a series all about Hadrian’s Wall. First post here.

Foz Meadows on how to learn to write about female desire. (This is an awesome post and I want to hug it. Because, desire itself aside, yeah, fanfiction? Once I started reading it? Actually gave me models for my own sexuality when I couldn’t really find many examples elsewhere.)

Strange Horizons roundtables “Representing Marginalised Voices in Historical Fiction and Fantasy,” with Joyce Chng, David Anthony Durham, and Kari Sperring, moderated by Vanessa Rose Phin.

Via Max Gladstone, “LIT MISERABLES, Or, Les Écrivains Misérables. Produced by Andrea Phillips, starring: Andrea Phillips [Ensemble], Max Gladstone [Javert, Marius], Fran Wilde [Gavroche], Sarah Pinsker [Eponine], Lynne Thomas [Fantine, Marius, Thenadiers, Eponine], James Sutter [Javert], Mishell Baker [Cosette], Martin Cahill.” This? This is awesome.

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Books in brief: Bear, Clark, Scalzi, Lee, Dalrymple, Rediker

Elizabeth Bear, Karen Memory. Tor, 2015. ARC courtesy of the publisher.

This book. This book. I don’t even know how to talk about it. I need to read it again and again. It did everything right for me. It’s all my narrative kinks rolled up into one – including some I didn’t even know I had, and some things I would’ve thought I’d hate to see but they’re done so well – and wrapped up with a positive ending and it all just works.

Read it. Read it. READ IT I NEED TO TALK ABOUT IT WITH PEOPLE.

Except you can’t read it until next year. So I’m going to have to think about how to talk about it some more.

John Scalzi, Lock In. US: Tor, 2014; UK: Gollancz, 2014. Copy courtesy of Gollancz.

The last time I was writing up my books, I asked myself, “Have I forgotten something?” And it turns out that I had, because the night beforehand I’d read Lock In and it had not made enough impression to last. This is in many ways a very forgettable book: competent, but of the stuff of which airport paperbacks are made. A whodunnit with a couple of Sufficiently Advanced Technology elements. I really don’t have very much at all to say about it, and I’m damned if I can even remember the characters’ names.

Sharon Lee, Carousel Sea. Baen, 2015. e-ARC courtesy of the publisher.

Third installment in small-town fantasy series. Will include in future SWM column. Interesting, soothing, pulls all its punches.

Elizabeth May, The Falconer. Gollancz, 2013.

Debut novel. Fairies. Violence. Scotland. Steampunk. It is crack and it is terrible and it is actually quite a bit of fun.

nonfiction

William Dalrymple, The Return of a King: the Battle for Afghanistan. Bloomsbury, 2013.

New history of the first British Afghan war, and one that makes liberal use of sources in the local languages. A fascinating read.

Marcus Rediker, The Amistad Rebellion: an Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom. Verso, 2013.

Rediker writes good history. This one is relatively short, for him, and very accessible: an account of the Amistad slave mutiny and the long struggle of the survivors to return to their West African homes. Solid, informative, compelling.

Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. Penguin, 2013.

A weighty (500+ pages excluding index, notes and bibliography, at 10pt-type) volume, but a deeply fascinating and extraordinarily well-written piece of history, that is astonishingly clear in its presentation of the complex factors and personalities on the European scene, and routes by which the decisions of the European powers ultimately narrowed down to war. A really excellent history book.

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A collection of links for your entertainment

The making of Pacific Rim – 30 minute documentary.

Re-making the Real Middle Ages.

“Fists in the Mouth of the Beast”: On Irish Folklore. I don’t agree with the author completely, but on the folklore and the Other Ireland? Oh, yeah. That thing right there.

xkcd: Future Self. Oh, I love this one. (Dear past self: why did you leave so many square brackets? Why?)

Roman fort uncovered at Gernsheim. Via Bread and Circuses.

“We need citizens, not just taxpayers and bookkeepers.” Canadian, but widely applicable.

Reviews department reorganisation at Strange Horizons.

“What We’re Afraid To Say About Ebola.” Sobering editorial.

The One-Sex Body On Trial reviewed at the BMCR.

Elizabeth Bear on her Least Favorite Trope. Yeah, that’s one of mine, too.

And here’s a random kitten picture, via @fadeaccompli:

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Thomas F. Bonnell, THE MOST DISREPUTABLE TRADE: PUBLISHING THE CLASSICS OF ENGLISH POETRY 1765-1810

Thomas F. Bonnell, The Most Disreputable Trade: Publishing the Classics of English Poetry, 1765-1810. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008.

It’s my habit to keep a book in the bathroom to read while cleaning my teeth… and doing other things… a book I don’t mind reading three and four pages at a time. By this means, I’ve learned a little about a large number of historical things. I seized on this particular book because of the interesting – dare I say alluring? – title, and because I’d read a history of the illegal book trade in prerevolutionary France that was quite frankly fascinating.

Well. Don’t judge a book by its title. Quite frankly, I expected something more… lascivious? Disreputable? Something more scandalous? But nope. No scandal! No disrepute! Not even any really juicy bookselling feuds, for crying out loud. It’s a fairly bland history of the creation of a publishing canon of English poetry by printers and booksellers in Britain. Apparently, the “most disreputable trade” part refers to what one London publisher thought would become of the publishing trade after a copyright decision went against them.

I was seduced by a misleading title, and now I know more than anyone really needs to about collections of English poetry in the late 18th century. Doubtless I will forget it all with great promptness, and remember only that there is a book in which information about it may be found.

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Books in brief: Briggs, Rouaud, Griffith, Wecker, Reid

Patricia Briggs, Shifting Sands. Ace, 2014. ARC.

Read for review for Tor.com. A collection of short fiction set in Briggs’ urban fantasy world. Entertaining, but nothing particularly special.

Antoine Rouaud, The Path of Anger. Gollancz, 2013. Translated from the French by Tom Clegg. Copy courtesy of the publisher.

Read for review for Ideomancer.com. Ambitious and not entirely successful epic-style fantasy novel. Lacks decent female characters. Mixed feelings overall. Jared Shurin has a good comprehensive review of it at Pornokitsch.

Nicola Griffith, Slow River. Gollancz, 2013 (1995).

An excellent meditative book about identity and growth and never being the same person you were before. Brilliant. Highly recommended.

Helene Wecker, The Golem and the Djinni. Harper, 2013.

Read for the column. A fable about immigration and loneliness. Not without its problems, but overall a gorgeous, accomplished debut. Recommended.

Non-fiction

Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce 1450-1680, two vols. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1988-1993.

I believe I heard of these books when Kate Elliott mentioned them on Twitter: they are exactly what they say in the title, and very interesting the history of that time and place is, too. It does bring home to me how little I know about Southeast Asian history in general: I’ll be skimming the bibliography for available titles to add to my store of knowledge, I think.

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The Odeion of Herodes Atticus

Built by Herodes Atticus, Greek, Roman senator, confidante of the Emperor Hadrian, to the memory of his wife Regilla (whose brother accused Herodes of her murder). Mid 2nd-century CE. Incorporated into the Byzantine and later Ottoman fortification walls of the acropolis.

Entrance to the lower tiers!

The Odeion was quite tall.

And not just tall…

They’re setting up for Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman” opera.

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The Cats of Athens

Because the internet is for cat pictures.

Cat of the Hill of the Muses

Cat of the top of the Classical Agora

Cat of the Tourist Information Office, Dionysiou Areopagitou

Cat, very pregnant, of beside the Panathenaic Way

Cat of the Athenian Acropolis, shortly before she bellied herself under the leftmost marble block.

Bonus! Unsociable Tortoise of the Pnyx

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Linky is suffering the effects of disturbing the sleeping cat

Motto of the morning: let sleeping cats lie, even if they are on your laundry. Ouch.

I missed Locus Magazine’s tasteless April Fools post about Wiscon and burqas, but here’s some follow-up:

File 770, April Fails Day.

James Davis Nicoll, Locus apologises.

Aidan Moher has Thoughts On the 2013 Hugo Nominations.

And from Archaeology Magazine, news of the discovery of Pluto’s Gate:

STANBUL, TURKEY—Francesco D’Andria of the University of Salento announced that he has unearthed the structures of Pluto’s Gate, known as the portal to the underworld in Greco-Roman tradition, at the World Heritage site of Hierapolis in southwest Turkey. The remains of a temple, a pool, and a series of steps above a cave that emits poisonous gases were found, in addition to an inscription with a dedication to Pluto… and Kore.

More details at Discovery News.

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Linky has some politics and history and anthropology

Politics: Feminist Ire on why childbirth should be on the feminist agenda in Ireland.

History: La Maupin:

She is said to have been “born with masculine inclinations” as well as having been educated in a very masculine way. Certainly, she often dressed as a man and when she did so could be mistaken for one. She also seemed to have at least as much an eye for members of her own sex as for men. Her skill with the sword, either in exhibition or duels fought in earnest, seems to have been exceptional.

Two audio lectures on ancient medicine from Vivian Nutton and G.E.R. Lloyd respectively.

Easing Into The Past: A Brief History of Being Comfortable:

As this new consumer class was born, philosophers and social commentators vented their frustrations at luxury, claiming it to be an agent of moral corruption. “Soft commerce” (doux commerce), as it was called, softened the men who partook of it, making them weak, effeminate, and more like an increasingly futile aristocracy. “Necessity,” on the other hand, was the realm of poverty and paupers, of peasants who lived on black bread and had little access to niceties. “Comfort,” a term that previously meant “aid” or “consolation” (as when one comforts one’s friend), now came into vogue as a term that inhabited a middle ground between luxury and necessity, connoting a form of consumption that increased the ease of one’s life without casting one into the moral danger posed by its more luxurious counterparts.

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Linky is cranky crank

Apparently deliberate practice is the best way to carry on. I shall henceforth fail to feel guilty for not working on my thesis more than four hours at a time.

Or strive to.

LGBTQ Characters: If They’re In My Life They Should Be In The Fiction I Read:

LGBTQ characters, protagonist or support cast, should be as common as the varied people in our lives. I don’t know about you, but any given week, I associate with, hang out with, deal with, talk with, laugh with, put up with, experience life with people who are gay, straight, bi-, brown, white, black, male, female, trans-, old, young, comfortably well off or strugglingly poor, and every mix and match possible. We are real people and we have real issues. Our lives are just as complicated as anyone else’s and just as ripe for storytelling as anyone’s.

Marie Brennan talks some more about writing epic fantasy.

Anita Sarkeesian has the first of the Tropes Vs. Women in Video-Games out.

And there’s an exhibition in the British Museum on In Search of Classical Greece.

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Books in brief: Hambly, Good Man Friday; Locke, Up Against It; Kent, The Clone Republic; and Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture 1830-1980

Barbara Hambly, Good Man Friday. Severn House, 2013.

Another excellent installment in the Benjamin Janvier series. If you have not yet read the Benjamin Janvier mysteries, do so. They are seven different kinds of brilliant.

M.J. Locke, Up Against It. Tor, 2011. Copy courtesy of Tor.com.

READ THIS BOOK. Seriously. This is one of the best works of “hard” science fiction I’ve read. It’s fully as good as anything else in the field – better than most, with well-developed, fully rounded characters, interestingly plausible science, and a smashing thriller plot. What I don’t understand is why it’s flown under the radar. It seems like a Terrible Oversight.

So go read it. Seriously. Probably you will like it, if you like Stross’s less futureshocky SF, or Chris Moriarty, or, I think, Bear’s Dust. Near-future near-space asteroid SF!

Steven L. Kent, The Clone Republic. Titan Books, 2013. (First published 2006.) Copy courtesy of Titan Books.

Oy. This book. This book is so bad. And so blind to its clueless white-guy misogyny and thoughtless colonialism. And tedious! I am composing a review-rant. It may take some time, for I read this in search of light entertainment – the pull-quote-blurb compares it favourably to Jack Campbell – and instead come away feeling soiled and dehumanised.

Do not recommend.

Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980. Virago, 1987.

Like any work of history that carries its narrative up to within a decade of its writing, its latter chapters and conclusion are doomed to age poorly. But the greater proportion of this book is a lucid, solid – at times brilliant – social history of women and madness in English culture.

Well recommended.