More ghosts of prosperity past from Web Urbanist
I am a New York City-based social researcher. I write about social theory, religion, politics, culture, books, Europe, facial hair, and other things that catch my interest.
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“Americans who want to emphasize that ‘politics isn’t all there is to life’ are people who don’t feel very keenly the sting of injustice or the anxiety of uncertainty or the horror of what this country does in our name. When you lose your job because of politics, or can’t afford to go to school because of politics, or are denied full citizenship because of politics, or die because of politics, the idea that ‘politics isn’t all there is to life’ will be cold comfort to you.”
I really just wanted to teach myself a bit more about typesetting, but I ended up creating an entire book with a cover, an index, and fleurons! I set the text of Georg Simmel’s Lebensanschauung, originally published in 1918 and digitalized by socio.ch (Simmel’s work entered the public domain seventy years after his death), and think it didn’t turn out too badly. Check it out!
Gabriel García Márquez with a black eye after being punched in the face by Mario Vargas Llosa, 2010 Nobel Laureate in Literature, in 1976.
Discovering Stead
On a recent vacation, I did some long-overdue beach reading (critics of beach reading be damned), the major upshot of which was that I read Christina Stead’s wonderful novel The Man Who Loved Children. I am grateful for the haunting power and beauty of her prose and that, by mere serendipity, I became aware of the book’s existence after seeing a reference to its author in an article I read for work-related reasons. Only later did I find out that no lesser authority than Jonathan Franzen, author of the much-hyped Freedom, recently recommended this work for summer reading. This apparently helped the relatively obscure book to gain a higher profile this year, the seventieth anniversary of its original publication in 1940. For that, Franzen is no doubt to be thanked.
Read the amazing story of how Michael Muhammad Knight accidentally started a movement.
Then listen to this amazing song.
Three is a magic number
I recently finished a disappointing book, a poorly conceived and executed study on the significance of the number three in sociology (Bálint Balla, Die Zahl Drei und die Soziologie, Hamburg: Krämer, 2008). What made the book especially frustrating was not its lack of editorial quality, its murky epistemology, or its unjustifiably high price (almost 23 euros for a 150-page paperback), but that it could have been a decent book. Although it may not sound that way, I respect Professor Balla for acting on his idiosyncratic research interest. That takes guts. I just wanted him to push further.
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Human bodies will forever keep the dictators awake at night with a mixture of love and hatred. Fleshy human bodies are the vessels of ingratiation but are also the tools of sedition. Without these bodies the rulers would have nothing to rule over. However, what fills them with silent dread are associations amongst these human bodies. From the perspective of an autocracy, “excessive closeness” between two human bodies is not permitted because it may set off a sort of avalanche effect—it may cause “excessive closeness” between even more and more human bodies which will set off “excessive closeness” between innumerable human bodies. Dictators despise this sort of outcome. Associations between human bodies are the source of their paranoia and will forever keep them worrying awake at night.
This is the autocracy’s Achilles’ heel; they are delighted when with the wave of a hand they can control gatherings of people such as reviews of the troops or patriotic assemblies. What they fear the most are gatherings of people that they cannot control with the wave of a hand, such as any manner of protests, such as twitterers’ scrutiny of the case of the three Fujian netizens who were wrongly accused, or such as the two grass mud horse banquets that were held last evening.
”— Xu Hui (许晖), “The Symbolic Association of Grass Mud Horses”
Here’s a paragraph I just started to write that will probably not make it into the final version of this paper. It felt good to write it though.
In the past twenty years, since the decline of secularization theory, a self-proclaimed “new paradigm” has had a stranglehold on debates within the sociology of religion. Kicking promising efforts to rekindle the vision of classical sociological thought in the subdiscipline into the dustbin (e.g., Turner, Religion and Social Theory), these scholars dismissed any intellectual concern beyond a narrowly defined understanding of “scientific explanation” and welcomed economic colonization with open arms.
