The reactions to the blog post I wrote last week are indicative of the very point I was trying to make—a point that has been obscured by emphatic declarations of personal experiences and a point that warrants a quick rejoinder. Continue reading “The Privilege of Being Part of the Problem”
“They’ve Given You a Number and Taken Away Your Name”
A while back a couple Edge posts appeared on the topic of “code switching” (Merinda’s post is here and Monica’s is here). Listening to NPR this morning I heard a story on the NSA’s use of codewords for its various clandestine projects — how it follows longstanding conventions in writing them as one word and in all caps, like SHARKFINN, KEYSTONE, or DISHFIRE — and that made me think again on the topic of code switching. Continue reading ““They’ve Given You a Number and Taken Away Your Name””
Come On Baby, Light My Fire
Did you hear about the Olympic torch going into space the other day?
No flame; just the torch.
Not content to just light it in Greece or with the usual spectacle of running it to wherever it is being hosted that year (a relay started when Nazi Germany hosted the 1936 summer Olympics, by the way), the Russians not only took it into space (yawn: the third time this has happened) but out on a space walk as well — a first! Continue reading “Come On Baby, Light My Fire”
The Jurisdiction of the Edge
See the make-over to which Travis refers On Heritage
Read more.
Meaningless Surveys: The Faulty Mathematics of the Nones
Culture on the Edge’s Monica Miller and Steven Ramey co-authored the following post,
published originally at the Huffington Post on November 7, 2013.
People unaffiliated with a religion, commonly grouped as the ‘Nones’, are all the rage right now and have beckoned responses from faith leaders to philosophers and scholars of religion. Common among such responses is an unwavering and uncritical belief in the statistical reality of this group; very few, in our opinion, have questioned how this group came to exist in the laboratory of statistical analysis and myopic survey questions. Most recently, a series on the New York Times Room for Debate page featured references to the Nones and the similar Pew report on the status of Judaism in America. However, the methodological basis for all of this excitement is actually quite thin. Continue reading “Meaningless Surveys: The Faulty Mathematics of the Nones”
Bayart on the Imaginaire
“In short, the ambivalence inherent in the very notion of the imaginaire and its complex relationship with the order of materiality compels us to relinquish a certain use of the concept that is nonetheless widespread. We should not take literally expressions such as ‘social imaginaire‘ or ‘historical imaginaire‘. They are convenient, but they suggest that a given social (or historical) imaginaire is a totality, endowed with a range of relatively coherent and restricted meanings. This might lead us to attribute to the imaginaire powers that we have just denied culture, and to confer on it the ability to over-determine political practice. When all is said and done, the concept of the imaginaire, understood in this way, is no more than a pedantic version of the concept of culture.” (227-8)
Reorganizing Sympathies
This old image recently made the rounds again in my Facebook feed, and I shared it myself. It got me into a little bit of an argument on one of my friends’ wall. The objection was along these lines: if we water down “feminism” to gender equity, which pretty much everyone can agree to these days, then it becomes meaningless—it’s not substantial enough of a vision to drive a real agenda. Continue reading “Reorganizing Sympathies”
On the Modernity of History
Andie Alexander, Culture on the Edge’s Curator, has posted once again on the Grad Blog for the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama on how present interests drive historical narratives.
Take a look.
On Fragments
Read more.