By Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn
It is exciting for us that the Italy-U.S. Fulbright Commission requested permission to post links to the pieces, thus featuring the USIH blog internationally. Here are all the posts: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, and Part V.
As I reread the five brief essays, I asked myself, looking back, what major points other than the specifics that I wished readers might get out of my random meditations on my semester’s exposure to Italian intellectual life. Most of what I was getting at fall under the following headings:
1. Living with Precarity. Bad news: we are not alone in this. Good news: we are not in this alone. Italian faculty members, graduate students, and others devoted to scholarly inquiry in the Humanities face the same crisis we do.Yet, like us—--like USIH—--many of them are actively nurturing passions and practices in areas intersecting with American intellectual history, often in spite of a lack of institutional and moral support from above.
2. Conversation. Social critics and cultural historians must at some point generalize. Yet there is a very real fear that the line between drawing general conclusions about other people (or ourselves), on the one hand, and stereotyping or “othering” them (or ourselves), on the other hand, can become blurred. Instead of complexification as the answer to simplification, the veils between us and those we are analyzing (even when we have met them and they are us) are as much the subject as any kind of authentic identity beneath they might reveal if lifted. They can only be an understood part of the subject if we are at once self-reflective and conversant—--linguistically, physically, imaginatively—--that is, in conversation with those whom we would like to understand and with others trying to understand them.
3. Food. The Slow Food Movement in Italy suggests that hope can be found in the blend of tradition and innovation that allows us to fuse longstanding practices of pleasure, insight, and excellence with visions and desires for changing what ails us. This transcends tired liberal-conservative dichotomies that frustrate and siphon off potentially new, dissenting, or oppositional energies. Being able to feed ourselves literally and figuratively, in ways that do not separate need from taste, is the starting point.
4. Place. As American scholars of things American, cultivating a habit of looking beyond our usual geographically delimited horizons could bring new possibilities for comradeship and conviviality. This is not the call for the internationalization of American history with which we are already familiar, but a new kind of inter-continental localism that suggests that alertness to and immersion in the particular locations in which inquiry takes place can deepen our personal-professional pursuits. The magic of face-to-face interaction and specific settings in which the intellectual arts are practiced can and should affect our scholarship.
5. Intimacy. Intellectual historical inquiry is one pathway of connection to another person and his or her inner life. The physical aspect of another person’s library, in part or whole, brings to light overlapping worlds of the abstract and the material, the mundane and the timeless. Even the most searing criticism of the past and present involves and invokes reverence, awe, humility, acknowledgement of mystery, and limits upon knowledge.Libraries confide all of this and more.
Intimacy, place, food, conversation…sounds like Italy, right? It’s the best way to live with precarity, isn’t it? No, it’s the only way.
Stepping back now, the overarching sense of things I was trying to convey in ruminating over some of my Italian adventures was just that possibilities for life-enhancing and even at times life-saving connection can be found in places we might not necessarily look first. In other words, it is nothing more than the truism most readers of this blog probably knew long before I did, that a change of location can foster a vitally new perspective on matters one thought one already had some kind of window into—such as, in our case, intellectual life in one’s own country. After all, no one from USIH stared dumbfounded, though others certainly did, at the thought of a modern Americanist’s itinerary to study and conduct research in Rome. In sum, I was invited to Rome to teach and, predictably, Rome taught me more than I could ever have learned otherwise—and not just about Rome.
At the start of his life of Demosthenes, Plutarch ridicules the notion that “to a man's being happy it is in the first place requisite he should be born in ‘some famous city’” (Quotes from John Dryden’s translation as it appears here). As with the word “is,” that depends on what your definition of “happy” is:
But for him that would attain to true happiness, which for the most part is placed in the qualities and disposition of the mind, it is, in my opinion, of no other disadvantage to be of a mean, obscure country, than to be born of a small or plain-looking woman. For it were ridiculous to think that Iulis, a little part of Ceos, which itself is no great island, and Aegina, which an Athenian once said ought to be removed, like a small eyesore, from the port of Piraeus should breed good actors and poets, and yet should never be able to produce a just,temperate, wise, and high-minded man. Other arts, whose end it is to acquire riches or honour, are likely enough to wither and decay in poor and undistinguished towns; but virtue, like a strong and durable plant, may take root and thrive in any place where it can lay hold of an ingenuous nature, and a mind that is industrious.
Then he goes on to talk about what living in a location, such as a major urban center, especially when not one’s place of birth,can offer. His view of travel for research is an expansive one that would call into question the asocial archival burrower of our time as the consummate professional historian.
But if any man undertake to write a history that has to be collected from materials gathered by observation and the reading of works not easy to be got in all places, nor written always in his own language, but many of them foreign and dispersed in other hands, for him, undoubtedly, it is in the first place and above all things most necessary to reside in some city of good note, addicted to liberal arts, and populous; where he may have plenty of all sorts of books, and upon inquiry may hear and inform himself of such particulars as, having escaped the pens of writers, are more faithfully preserved in the memories of men, lest his work be deficient in many things, even those which it can least dispense with.
But for me, I live in a little town…
As I return to my own little town, the small city of Syracuse, Plutarch’s words resound with an uncanny, otherworldly echo, just as the place names of Central New York will never sound in my ears with their Italian counterparts far behind. Since his travels “in Rome and other parts of Italy,” he wrote, “that which happened to me may seem strange, though it be true; for it was not so much by the knowledge of words that I came to the understanding of things, as by my experience of things I was enabled to follow the meaning of words.” Perhaps this should be the same for us.
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn
Syracuse, New York
Tampilkan postingan dengan label Italy. Tampilkan semua postingan
Tampilkan postingan dengan label Italy. Tampilkan semua postingan
Senin, 25 Juni 2012
Minggu, 03 Juni 2012
From Rome with Love IV
by Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn
My experience in Rome this semester has taught me or made me realize anew just how narrow are the contours of the academic specializations and institutional arrangements we have inherited. Not only are they embarrassingly limited, but they are limiting.
My brief exposure to Italian intellectual life here has brought into my view everything from particular writers whose works I did not know before to movements, approaches, events, ideas, places, institutions, and much more. After a couple of decades in the historical profession in the U.S., I don't think it is too much of a stretch to say many American historians today are unaware of intellectual currents in Italy and beyond. Why? That is for another post. Here I'll just pass on some observations about one of the events here that I found inspiring.
Last post I wrote about the Fulbright seminar on food and sustainability at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, which had ramifications well beyond that topic. Also worthy of your attention, I believe, is an annual conference, organized by the U.S.- Italy Fulbright Commission, the Italian Association for North American Studies (Associazione Italiana di Studi Nord-Americani or AISNA), and Rome's Center for American Studies (Centro Studi Americani), where the conference takes place. As a Fulbright Scholar this year, I was invited to deliver three talks throughout the week at this year's conference, "Turning in and Out of the American Century," which took place from May 7-11. The program is available here.
First, a word on this location. Go see this incredible place if you can. After seeing it, I think we should seek out such centers wherever we go. The Centro Studi Americani is located in a spectacular 17th-century building on one of the most charming cobblestone streets in Rome. When I finally found my way to the Center (this was before I knew a street address and a map without every street, however tiny and un-street-like, does not get one very far in Rome), I walked through a courtyard with statuary, up gracious steps, and through a wrought iron gate (I was buzzed in after announcing myself). The helpful library staff gave me a tour of the serene reading room, the seminar and lecture rooms, and the floor to ceiling bookcases everywhere (it has a library begun at the start of the 20th-century), broken only by huge windows that let in soft natural light. It's a great place to work--or daydream. Stunning murals glow from the ceilings. When we came to the end of the tour of one room leading to yet another charming room, with high ceilings balanced by cozy, gratifyingly old-school reading/conversation nooks, I was shown the lecture hall in which I would speak. Here it is, from the Center's website:
Just seeing this room made me bring a whole new kind of energy, and even content, to my little triad of papers. What is so often missing in American academic settings for the presentation and reception of work like ours, I see now by contrast with the parts of the Italian practices to which I have been exposed, is a certain quality difficult to put into words but having to do with respect for and appreciation of the intellectual arts. A valuing of this work in the larger scheme of things. An unwillingness to trivialize it. A sense of its beauty and importance and allure.
Of course, the building could be a fluke. In Italy, the combination of the disastrous economic situation generally and the factors of recent decades in the tragic decline in the humanities have starved in familiar fashion history and closely related disciplines like literature and philosophy. But at this event, and others like it today, there were signs that long traditions of inquiry are stronger than the current obstacles they face. It seems to me this is what we are saying by practicing what we do even when financial and other practicalities and priorities are arrayed against us. It helped to be in a room and a building that silently spoke volumes about the vital importance of the study of culture.
The setting would have rung hollow, of course, without the voices of the particular people involved in the "Seminario"; the Fulbright fellows, of course, but also those from Italy who set the tone of the whole event. For one, the current president of AISNA, Professor Andrea Mariani, who teaches in the Dipartimento di Studi Comparati e Comunicazione Interculturale at the Università “G. D’Annunzio” di Chieti-Pescara. He welcomed us with rare wit and warmth. He embodies that perfect blend of intellectual seriousness and conviviality so rare in modern academe, except in oases like USIH. He told me about AISNA's journal, which we should know about since we study its themes. (I noticed the submission deadline is June 15 of each year, so if you have something of immediate interest, you should check out submission guidelines and see the contact information on the website.)
Besides other organizers and hosts were the faculty members and graduate students who attended from all over Italy. Although for many English was their second language, many were clearly eager to be challenged with new perspectives at the highest level. Many were literary scholars, though others came from political science, history, and even in at least one case from translation studies, another field that should be more closely entwined with ours. Though aware of postmodernism, many were interested in supposedly old-fashioned approaches--those still based on text and context, not theory unmoored, or worse, mere intellectual politics. From talking at considerable length with some of these students, this radical interest in the written word made them truer contrarians, as in genuinely going against the grain, as USIH clearly is. Their interest in the resurgent conversation about just the kinds of themes we study was manifest. This commonality (not just with Italians but with those throughout the world the neglect of whose serious interest in American intellectual history impoverishes us) could be the basis for an infusion of new blood in the form of collaboration and exchange, the most meaningful kind of support for what we--and they--do.
One more detail I find indicative that there are exciting possibilities for connections between USIH and Italian scholars is that the keynote speaker for this wonderful event was none other than our own T.J. Jackson Lears of No Place of Grace and Raritan fame, among his many other stellar accomplishments. His talk, "Animal Spirits Revisted: American Capitalism and Emotional Life," was a brilliant tour--for me a parallel, in a way, to the tour I received through the beautiful Center from one room to the other until ending up in the engulfing heart of a room in which we met--through era after era of economic and cultural history as major developments affected the warp and woof of Americans' emotional lives.
On a personal note, finally getting to meet this scholar I had looked up to for many years had a surreal quality to it. Or maybe the conversation we had in Rome--along with this ideal seminar of students and faculty members, the elegant room in which the conference took place, our host's genuinely gentlemanly demeanor, and the rest--was too good to be true. These things might help broaden the contours of what is possible in our conversations and scholarship, helping us continue imagining new kinds of events and experiences, or maybe they were just idealized images painted somehow within the isolated chamber of my own mind. Maybe it is just my mind's own ceiling murals casting everything in a warm glow. As I said, the Center is a great place to work--or daydream.
My experience in Rome this semester has taught me or made me realize anew just how narrow are the contours of the academic specializations and institutional arrangements we have inherited. Not only are they embarrassingly limited, but they are limiting.
My brief exposure to Italian intellectual life here has brought into my view everything from particular writers whose works I did not know before to movements, approaches, events, ideas, places, institutions, and much more. After a couple of decades in the historical profession in the U.S., I don't think it is too much of a stretch to say many American historians today are unaware of intellectual currents in Italy and beyond. Why? That is for another post. Here I'll just pass on some observations about one of the events here that I found inspiring.
Last post I wrote about the Fulbright seminar on food and sustainability at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, which had ramifications well beyond that topic. Also worthy of your attention, I believe, is an annual conference, organized by the U.S.- Italy Fulbright Commission, the Italian Association for North American Studies (Associazione Italiana di Studi Nord-Americani or AISNA), and Rome's Center for American Studies (Centro Studi Americani), where the conference takes place. As a Fulbright Scholar this year, I was invited to deliver three talks throughout the week at this year's conference, "Turning in and Out of the American Century," which took place from May 7-11. The program is available here.
First, a word on this location. Go see this incredible place if you can. After seeing it, I think we should seek out such centers wherever we go. The Centro Studi Americani is located in a spectacular 17th-century building on one of the most charming cobblestone streets in Rome. When I finally found my way to the Center (this was before I knew a street address and a map without every street, however tiny and un-street-like, does not get one very far in Rome), I walked through a courtyard with statuary, up gracious steps, and through a wrought iron gate (I was buzzed in after announcing myself). The helpful library staff gave me a tour of the serene reading room, the seminar and lecture rooms, and the floor to ceiling bookcases everywhere (it has a library begun at the start of the 20th-century), broken only by huge windows that let in soft natural light. It's a great place to work--or daydream. Stunning murals glow from the ceilings. When we came to the end of the tour of one room leading to yet another charming room, with high ceilings balanced by cozy, gratifyingly old-school reading/conversation nooks, I was shown the lecture hall in which I would speak. Here it is, from the Center's website:
Just seeing this room made me bring a whole new kind of energy, and even content, to my little triad of papers. What is so often missing in American academic settings for the presentation and reception of work like ours, I see now by contrast with the parts of the Italian practices to which I have been exposed, is a certain quality difficult to put into words but having to do with respect for and appreciation of the intellectual arts. A valuing of this work in the larger scheme of things. An unwillingness to trivialize it. A sense of its beauty and importance and allure.
Of course, the building could be a fluke. In Italy, the combination of the disastrous economic situation generally and the factors of recent decades in the tragic decline in the humanities have starved in familiar fashion history and closely related disciplines like literature and philosophy. But at this event, and others like it today, there were signs that long traditions of inquiry are stronger than the current obstacles they face. It seems to me this is what we are saying by practicing what we do even when financial and other practicalities and priorities are arrayed against us. It helped to be in a room and a building that silently spoke volumes about the vital importance of the study of culture.
The setting would have rung hollow, of course, without the voices of the particular people involved in the "Seminario"; the Fulbright fellows, of course, but also those from Italy who set the tone of the whole event. For one, the current president of AISNA, Professor Andrea Mariani, who teaches in the Dipartimento di Studi Comparati e Comunicazione Interculturale at the Università “G. D’Annunzio” di Chieti-Pescara. He welcomed us with rare wit and warmth. He embodies that perfect blend of intellectual seriousness and conviviality so rare in modern academe, except in oases like USIH. He told me about AISNA's journal, which we should know about since we study its themes. (I noticed the submission deadline is June 15 of each year, so if you have something of immediate interest, you should check out submission guidelines and see the contact information on the website.)
Besides other organizers and hosts were the faculty members and graduate students who attended from all over Italy. Although for many English was their second language, many were clearly eager to be challenged with new perspectives at the highest level. Many were literary scholars, though others came from political science, history, and even in at least one case from translation studies, another field that should be more closely entwined with ours. Though aware of postmodernism, many were interested in supposedly old-fashioned approaches--those still based on text and context, not theory unmoored, or worse, mere intellectual politics. From talking at considerable length with some of these students, this radical interest in the written word made them truer contrarians, as in genuinely going against the grain, as USIH clearly is. Their interest in the resurgent conversation about just the kinds of themes we study was manifest. This commonality (not just with Italians but with those throughout the world the neglect of whose serious interest in American intellectual history impoverishes us) could be the basis for an infusion of new blood in the form of collaboration and exchange, the most meaningful kind of support for what we--and they--do.
One more detail I find indicative that there are exciting possibilities for connections between USIH and Italian scholars is that the keynote speaker for this wonderful event was none other than our own T.J. Jackson Lears of No Place of Grace and Raritan fame, among his many other stellar accomplishments. His talk, "Animal Spirits Revisted: American Capitalism and Emotional Life," was a brilliant tour--for me a parallel, in a way, to the tour I received through the beautiful Center from one room to the other until ending up in the engulfing heart of a room in which we met--through era after era of economic and cultural history as major developments affected the warp and woof of Americans' emotional lives.
On a personal note, finally getting to meet this scholar I had looked up to for many years had a surreal quality to it. Or maybe the conversation we had in Rome--along with this ideal seminar of students and faculty members, the elegant room in which the conference took place, our host's genuinely gentlemanly demeanor, and the rest--was too good to be true. These things might help broaden the contours of what is possible in our conversations and scholarship, helping us continue imagining new kinds of events and experiences, or maybe they were just idealized images painted somehow within the isolated chamber of my own mind. Maybe it is just my mind's own ceiling murals casting everything in a warm glow. As I said, the Center is a great place to work--or daydream.
Senin, 21 Mei 2012
From Rome with Love III
by Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn
In the battle merely to survive physically, food and shelter are essential, clothing (except as shelter) optional. That seems relatively simple, especially since these basic needs have been with us since our infancy at the so-called dawn of civilization.
Each of us tries for survival now with the means available in the postmodern economy. But what is remarkable, in these individualized times, is when one of us tries for the survival of someone else as well. So when a whole group tries, even better, not only for other people's survival but for their flourishing, it is doubly, triply, quadruply remarkable. This is one of those rare times, with manipulation and murkiness abundant, when a distinctly un-fuzzy math can actually prevail. Just multiply by the number of people and you get the degree of remarkability.
By this measure, Italy deserves perhaps not to be romanticized, exactly, as we can allocate its rather substantial flaws. But I think it should be considered a prime candidate for re-romanticization. It stands for food--good food. And now many are trying to describe a particular definition of good in a conversation that has ramifications well beyond food itself.
A few days ago I had the opportunity to travel to a small town in northern Italy named Pollenzo, near the city of Turin. The occasion was a half-day conference on food and sustainability put on by the Fulbright Commission. What I saw there was truly inspiring.
The conference took place at the University of Gastronomic Sciences (UNISG), a new university just founded in 2004. (See its website or this brief New York Times article.) The audience for the conference was largely comprised of students in the graduate programs there.
Housed in a rectangular layout of renovated farm buildings in the Piedmont region, with castle-like turrets at the corners and a central square, the university is one of the most pleasant places I have ever been. Even with its students congregating for the conference in clusters here and there, as well as the occasional tourist (there are two hotels, a restaurant, a wine bank, a chapel, gardens, a tiny orchard of indigenous trees, and preserved ruins, along with the classrooms and library), the atmosphere was one of bucolic serenity. Its silence, in this noisy age, was a balm.
Those intrigued by all aspects of food, from its problems to its pleasures, might recognize or be interested to learn about this location in northeast Italy. The University of Gastronomic Sciences was started by Carlo Petrini, who also founded the Slow Food Movement in 1986, and the international headquarters for the movement is in nearby Bra. The movement was spurred by the plan to erect a McDonalds at the Spanish Steps in Rome. With some 100,000 members in over 150 nations, the Slow Food Movement's stated aim is to promote "good, clean, and fair food for all":
"GOOD a fresh and flavorsome seasonal diet that satisfies the senses and is part of our local culture;
CLEAN food production and consumption that does not harm the environment, animal welfare or our health;
FAIR accessible prices for consumers and fair conditions and pay for small-scale producers."
The movement is dedicated to protecting and celebrating local culinary knowledge and practices, heirloom seeds and other precious products, small-scale farming and processing, and a slowed down process of food preparation and ingestion, for maximum health benefits and enjoyment. It is against agribusiness, factory farms, genetic engineering, the use of pesticides, and fast food. As such, it is a movement of resistance and radicalism, on the one hand, and preservation and conservation, on the other. It resists easy division along standard political lines of liberal versus conservative.
The university's name belies one of the most exciting things about it and the movement that produced it: both of them combine concern for the right way of doing things-morally, socially, culinarily--with the best way, in terms of our ultimate pleasure and contentment. It is that rare blend--all but nonexistent in the U.S., with its legendary focus on change, innovation, and "creative destruction," all in the name of progress--of the motivation to change deeply disturbing practices and conditions and the desire to protect treasured traditions. This is all about taste. In the deepest and most resonant senses of the word.
Like the conference's subject, which sounds as though it might have centered narrowly on future policy, the "gastronomic sciences" could sound off-putting to everyone except those interested in applied horticulture, biology, or perhaps cooking. But these initiatives have everything to do with ideas more broadly, and with history. This was evident throughout the presentations. For instance, Daniel J. Philippon, who teaches in the Department of English at the University of Minnesota, spoke on his current book project, an intriguing study of the shift from environmentalism to the sustainability movement through writings in key genres on land, food, and culture. As he laid out his approach and chapter organization, this work promises to be essentially an intellectual history of the sustainable food movement. Currently a Fulbright Professor at UNIGS and the University of Turin, he is the author of Conserving Words: How American Nature Writers Shaped the Environmental Movement and writes about many of the authors that are our stock in trade in U.S. Intellectual History, from Whitman to Berry. And Maria Grazia Quieti, Executive Director of the U.S.-Italy Fulbright Commission, delivered a talk entitled “Discourses on Food and Sustainability in Trade Negotiations,” in essence a recent intellectual history of sustainability, with the Seattle WTO protests rendered as a pivotal point at which the official "technical forum" was called into question and competing discourses on issues formerly the preserve of policy experts and academics became apparent. Her discussion of how ideas become institutionalized, powerfully shape "intersubjective reality," and can be challenged was helpful theoretically, and hints of her portrait of her experiences while at the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization--a project on which she is currently at work--were fascinating. Her humble, clarion call for a method of paying detailed attention to conversations seems akin to what we do.
My intent in this brief sketch is only to tell you enough to pique your interest if not in this particular subject or region, then in some of the intellectual vibrancy I see here--here as in Italy and in fields differing quite a bit in name from ours yet part of a common pursuit. If we really care about the history of ideas in cultural context, we can benefit from important projects underway seemingly far afield from our own specialties. We can possibly learn from them and savor them, both.
In the battle merely to survive physically, food and shelter are essential, clothing (except as shelter) optional. That seems relatively simple, especially since these basic needs have been with us since our infancy at the so-called dawn of civilization.
Each of us tries for survival now with the means available in the postmodern economy. But what is remarkable, in these individualized times, is when one of us tries for the survival of someone else as well. So when a whole group tries, even better, not only for other people's survival but for their flourishing, it is doubly, triply, quadruply remarkable. This is one of those rare times, with manipulation and murkiness abundant, when a distinctly un-fuzzy math can actually prevail. Just multiply by the number of people and you get the degree of remarkability.
By this measure, Italy deserves perhaps not to be romanticized, exactly, as we can allocate its rather substantial flaws. But I think it should be considered a prime candidate for re-romanticization. It stands for food--good food. And now many are trying to describe a particular definition of good in a conversation that has ramifications well beyond food itself.
A few days ago I had the opportunity to travel to a small town in northern Italy named Pollenzo, near the city of Turin. The occasion was a half-day conference on food and sustainability put on by the Fulbright Commission. What I saw there was truly inspiring.
The conference took place at the University of Gastronomic Sciences (UNISG), a new university just founded in 2004. (See its website or this brief New York Times article.) The audience for the conference was largely comprised of students in the graduate programs there.
Housed in a rectangular layout of renovated farm buildings in the Piedmont region, with castle-like turrets at the corners and a central square, the university is one of the most pleasant places I have ever been. Even with its students congregating for the conference in clusters here and there, as well as the occasional tourist (there are two hotels, a restaurant, a wine bank, a chapel, gardens, a tiny orchard of indigenous trees, and preserved ruins, along with the classrooms and library), the atmosphere was one of bucolic serenity. Its silence, in this noisy age, was a balm.
Those intrigued by all aspects of food, from its problems to its pleasures, might recognize or be interested to learn about this location in northeast Italy. The University of Gastronomic Sciences was started by Carlo Petrini, who also founded the Slow Food Movement in 1986, and the international headquarters for the movement is in nearby Bra. The movement was spurred by the plan to erect a McDonalds at the Spanish Steps in Rome. With some 100,000 members in over 150 nations, the Slow Food Movement's stated aim is to promote "good, clean, and fair food for all":
"GOOD a fresh and flavorsome seasonal diet that satisfies the senses and is part of our local culture;
CLEAN food production and consumption that does not harm the environment, animal welfare or our health;
FAIR accessible prices for consumers and fair conditions and pay for small-scale producers."
The movement is dedicated to protecting and celebrating local culinary knowledge and practices, heirloom seeds and other precious products, small-scale farming and processing, and a slowed down process of food preparation and ingestion, for maximum health benefits and enjoyment. It is against agribusiness, factory farms, genetic engineering, the use of pesticides, and fast food. As such, it is a movement of resistance and radicalism, on the one hand, and preservation and conservation, on the other. It resists easy division along standard political lines of liberal versus conservative.
The university's name belies one of the most exciting things about it and the movement that produced it: both of them combine concern for the right way of doing things-morally, socially, culinarily--with the best way, in terms of our ultimate pleasure and contentment. It is that rare blend--all but nonexistent in the U.S., with its legendary focus on change, innovation, and "creative destruction," all in the name of progress--of the motivation to change deeply disturbing practices and conditions and the desire to protect treasured traditions. This is all about taste. In the deepest and most resonant senses of the word.
Like the conference's subject, which sounds as though it might have centered narrowly on future policy, the "gastronomic sciences" could sound off-putting to everyone except those interested in applied horticulture, biology, or perhaps cooking. But these initiatives have everything to do with ideas more broadly, and with history. This was evident throughout the presentations. For instance, Daniel J. Philippon, who teaches in the Department of English at the University of Minnesota, spoke on his current book project, an intriguing study of the shift from environmentalism to the sustainability movement through writings in key genres on land, food, and culture. As he laid out his approach and chapter organization, this work promises to be essentially an intellectual history of the sustainable food movement. Currently a Fulbright Professor at UNIGS and the University of Turin, he is the author of Conserving Words: How American Nature Writers Shaped the Environmental Movement and writes about many of the authors that are our stock in trade in U.S. Intellectual History, from Whitman to Berry. And Maria Grazia Quieti, Executive Director of the U.S.-Italy Fulbright Commission, delivered a talk entitled “Discourses on Food and Sustainability in Trade Negotiations,” in essence a recent intellectual history of sustainability, with the Seattle WTO protests rendered as a pivotal point at which the official "technical forum" was called into question and competing discourses on issues formerly the preserve of policy experts and academics became apparent. Her discussion of how ideas become institutionalized, powerfully shape "intersubjective reality," and can be challenged was helpful theoretically, and hints of her portrait of her experiences while at the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization--a project on which she is currently at work--were fascinating. Her humble, clarion call for a method of paying detailed attention to conversations seems akin to what we do.
My intent in this brief sketch is only to tell you enough to pique your interest if not in this particular subject or region, then in some of the intellectual vibrancy I see here--here as in Italy and in fields differing quite a bit in name from ours yet part of a common pursuit. If we really care about the history of ideas in cultural context, we can benefit from important projects underway seemingly far afield from our own specialties. We can possibly learn from them and savor them, both.
Minggu, 13 Mei 2012
From Rome with Love, II
By Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn
When encountering something outside one's usual experience, one's first instinct is to draw comparisons and contrasts with what one knows. Trite and true, right?
It sounds so simple.
But of course there are deep philosophical and psychological questions about what makes us us and what makes them them--and ethical questions about whether it should. Layer onto this questions from theology, cognitive science, anthropology, and history, let alone art and literature, and we must ask, in more ways than one, who do we think we are?
When we take note of so-called cultural differences, is a generalization about our own or another culture ever accurate? Many recent reviews of Woody Allen's To Rome with Love (still haven't seen it) judge it replete with superficial stereotypes. Are works of cultural history or social criticism often that different, however careful they might try to be? Isn't the risk of over-simplifying--or, obversely, of over-complicating, more au courant in academia these days--a pitfall of generalizing at all, and thus of characterizing, portraying, or observing?
I am excited about the "For the Love of Film" preservation blogathon that begins today. (Look out for the upcoming posts by some of my fellow USIH bloggers later this week.) Musing on the Italian/American film connection, I came across a blog that compared Italian and American posters for the same classic American films by setting the posters side by side (here for Hitchcock film posters). They really do seem different. As with album cover art or wine labels, movie posters become increasingly intriguing the more I see.
This blogger and those who commented on her posts see the Italian posters as largely more compelling because "more artistic/intriguing/seductive." Other people, though, argue that translation isn't always an improvement, as when Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in English becomes the equivalent of If You Leave Me, I Delete You in Italian. (For this and other amusing examples from countries in addition to Italy, see here)
If we see differences, do we automatically conclude they are the result of cultural differences? If we see similarities, do we assume cultural similarity? Or perhaps these are gross generalizations, categorical simplifications.
Study after study these days, no matter what the subject matter, concludes: it was complex. Isn't that how it always is, once one gets to know anything better? That is is more complicated than it first appeared?
Not necessarily. Some of us actually might be predisposed to think of things as more complicated than they really are, only to find out, upon closer acquaintance that they are more understandable. People whose differences scared us through their foreign-ness might have seemed complicated until we see the patterns of their lives up close. Unfortunately, a workable simplicity only comes to some people by discovering that others are "just like us." This can do injustice to others, and to ourselves, as much as the famous faux pas (or worse) of "othering." To make matters worse, an excessive fear of "othering" can actually lead to the "othering" of oneself, I think, through the self-accusation: otherer. Like Hester Prynne, only with an "O."
The aim of the Fulbright Commission, by whose good graces I am living and teaching in Rome this semester, is "to increase understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries." With so much to be wary of today in terms of self-advertisement and what institutions really deliver, it is refreshing to see the ways Fulbright actually does make this possible. By supporting scholars at all levels for different lengths of time in numerous locations, but always in service of this kind of mutual learning, Fulbright offers opportunities for intellectual exchanges of the humble, day-to-day sort. It could be an inspiration to USIH, but then it seems that this is precisely what USIH is doing.
As we often see others as though through veils of our own past, present, and hopes or fears of the future, it is amazing we can ever see anyone at all. (As the Dylan line goes, "It's a wonder we can even feed ourselves." And of course, it remains to be seen if we can. In an upcoming post, I hope to describe my experience in Pollenzo, where the Slow Food movement took root.) As in an earlier Woody Allen film, in a bedroom scene in which he cannot abandon himself to love making because of the superimposition of the image of his mother on his lover's face, our imaginations--whether from guilt or another state--often make it impossible to glimpse one another at all. Other people become figments of our fantasies, whether pleasant or horrifying, and another place at best a mere utopia, from the Greek, meaning "no place."
To get beyond this might be a worthy goal, but it might also be an impossible one. And it may be undesirable, in any event. Worse than superficiality and stereotyping, it casts the multitudinous veils, which are just as much a part of anyone as anything else, as irrelevant. Drawing them back is a particular technique of observing. But it is when we strive for abstracted knowledge (abstracted from them, yes; abstracted from ourselves as well) of other people and places, we are prone to over-simplify or over-complicate. Understanding is another thing entirely.
[Updated: 5/14/2012, 7:40 am CST]
When encountering something outside one's usual experience, one's first instinct is to draw comparisons and contrasts with what one knows. Trite and true, right?
It sounds so simple.
But of course there are deep philosophical and psychological questions about what makes us us and what makes them them--and ethical questions about whether it should. Layer onto this questions from theology, cognitive science, anthropology, and history, let alone art and literature, and we must ask, in more ways than one, who do we think we are?
When we take note of so-called cultural differences, is a generalization about our own or another culture ever accurate? Many recent reviews of Woody Allen's To Rome with Love (still haven't seen it) judge it replete with superficial stereotypes. Are works of cultural history or social criticism often that different, however careful they might try to be? Isn't the risk of over-simplifying--or, obversely, of over-complicating, more au courant in academia these days--a pitfall of generalizing at all, and thus of characterizing, portraying, or observing?
I am excited about the "For the Love of Film" preservation blogathon that begins today. (Look out for the upcoming posts by some of my fellow USIH bloggers later this week.) Musing on the Italian/American film connection, I came across a blog that compared Italian and American posters for the same classic American films by setting the posters side by side (here for Hitchcock film posters). They really do seem different. As with album cover art or wine labels, movie posters become increasingly intriguing the more I see.
This blogger and those who commented on her posts see the Italian posters as largely more compelling because "more artistic/intriguing/seductive." Other people, though, argue that translation isn't always an improvement, as when Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in English becomes the equivalent of If You Leave Me, I Delete You in Italian. (For this and other amusing examples from countries in addition to Italy, see here)
If we see differences, do we automatically conclude they are the result of cultural differences? If we see similarities, do we assume cultural similarity? Or perhaps these are gross generalizations, categorical simplifications.
Study after study these days, no matter what the subject matter, concludes: it was complex. Isn't that how it always is, once one gets to know anything better? That is is more complicated than it first appeared?
Not necessarily. Some of us actually might be predisposed to think of things as more complicated than they really are, only to find out, upon closer acquaintance that they are more understandable. People whose differences scared us through their foreign-ness might have seemed complicated until we see the patterns of their lives up close. Unfortunately, a workable simplicity only comes to some people by discovering that others are "just like us." This can do injustice to others, and to ourselves, as much as the famous faux pas (or worse) of "othering." To make matters worse, an excessive fear of "othering" can actually lead to the "othering" of oneself, I think, through the self-accusation: otherer. Like Hester Prynne, only with an "O."
The aim of the Fulbright Commission, by whose good graces I am living and teaching in Rome this semester, is "to increase understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries." With so much to be wary of today in terms of self-advertisement and what institutions really deliver, it is refreshing to see the ways Fulbright actually does make this possible. By supporting scholars at all levels for different lengths of time in numerous locations, but always in service of this kind of mutual learning, Fulbright offers opportunities for intellectual exchanges of the humble, day-to-day sort. It could be an inspiration to USIH, but then it seems that this is precisely what USIH is doing.
As we often see others as though through veils of our own past, present, and hopes or fears of the future, it is amazing we can ever see anyone at all. (As the Dylan line goes, "It's a wonder we can even feed ourselves." And of course, it remains to be seen if we can. In an upcoming post, I hope to describe my experience in Pollenzo, where the Slow Food movement took root.) As in an earlier Woody Allen film, in a bedroom scene in which he cannot abandon himself to love making because of the superimposition of the image of his mother on his lover's face, our imaginations--whether from guilt or another state--often make it impossible to glimpse one another at all. Other people become figments of our fantasies, whether pleasant or horrifying, and another place at best a mere utopia, from the Greek, meaning "no place."
To get beyond this might be a worthy goal, but it might also be an impossible one. And it may be undesirable, in any event. Worse than superficiality and stereotyping, it casts the multitudinous veils, which are just as much a part of anyone as anything else, as irrelevant. Drawing them back is a particular technique of observing. But it is when we strive for abstracted knowledge (abstracted from them, yes; abstracted from ourselves as well) of other people and places, we are prone to over-simplify or over-complicate. Understanding is another thing entirely.
[Updated: 5/14/2012, 7:40 am CST]
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