In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

One striking feature of humans is that fact that we sometimes act together. We garden, paint, sing, and dance together. Moreover, we intuitively recognize the difference between our simply walking down the street alongside each other and our walking down the street together. The former involves coordinated action and intention; but the latter involves something more–what we might think of as a shared intention.  Once we recognize that shared activity involved share intentions, a range of distinctively philosophical questions emerge: What are shared intentions?  What is their structure?  How do they emerge?  How are they connected to group action? In Shared Agency: A Planning Theory of Acting Together (Oxford University Press, 2014), Michael E. Bratman addresses such questions.  He argues that the planning theory of individual agency that he has developed in previous work provides sufficient resources for understanding small-scale instances of acting together.  His claim, then, is that modestly social agency can be accounted for without the introduction of new philosophical elements such as “we intentions” and “joint commitment.”   Bratman provides a model of group action and intention that is philosophically sparing but explanatorily powerful.

Daniel Lee‘s new book, Petain’s Jewish Children: French Jewish Youth and the Vichy Regime, 1940-1942 (Oxford University Press, 2014) is highly compelling in its breadth, depth of research, and analysis. Focused on the social relationship between French Jews and the state during this critical period of French history, the book emphasizes the notion of a “Plural Vichy,” a regime that was complex rather than homogenous in its ideology and aims, including its antisemitism. Finding evidence of cooperation and accommodation between French Jewish young people and organizations and the state, the author shows the ways in which Vichy was uneven in its policies and practices, particularly in the two years immediately following the defeat of 1940. Drawing on a wealth of local and national archival sources, Petain’s Jewish Children examines Vichy’s inclusion of Jewish youth in the Chantiers de la Jeunesse, as well as responses of a range of Jewish youth organizations (including the Jewish Scouts) to Vichy’s ideals and plans. As the book shows, these groups saw in certain Vichy policies and programs for French regeneration (especially the notions of a national cultural revolution and a return to the land) opportunities for the improvement of self, community, and nation. The author also draws on a series of fascinating interviews he conducted with a number of French Jews who lived through this difficult period. Complicating our understanding of years that have been understood predominantly in terms of persecution, resistance, and rescue, Petain’s Jewish Children will be of great interest to scholars of both French and Jewish studies.

David Wright‘s 2011 book Downs: The History of a Disability (Oxford University Press, 2011), offers readers a history that stretches far beyond the strictly defined genetic disorder that is its namesake. Wright shows us how the condition that came to be known as Down’s syndrome has as much to do with the social history of what was called ‘idiocy’ in Early Modern times and reform movements to integrate the disabled beginning in the 1960s as it does with the rise of asylums or the disputed discovery of “trisomie vingt-et-un.” Even the legacy of the condition’s name is a telling narrative about the modernization of medicine, from the use of the term ‘mongoloid’ to justify the (progressive for the time) anthropological theory of racial reversion to debates over whether to rename the disease in honor of John Langdon Down or place it within a more rigid taxonomy of congenital mental disorders. On their own, all of these stories are compelling windows into different dimensions of medicine, and as a whole they comprise a book that shows readers just how contested the process of ‘medicalizing’ a condition has always been. The book’s chapters progress both chronologically and thematically. We begin with the legal definition of idiocy in the English Common Law as a way for the state to regulate the inheritance of property, and a glance at different contemporary philosophical understandings of mental handicap. Then, Wright discusses John Langdon Down’s work at the Earlswood Asylum and the influence of both education reforms and genetic studies on the definition of mental handicap. Proceeding through Jérôme Lejeune’s disputed discovery of trisomy 21 and the role of genetic screening in abortion debates, the book concludes by discussing how social movements in the late twentieth century have profoundly affected the ethical and political dimensions of Down’s syndrome. Winner of the British Society for the History of Science’s 2013 Dingle Prize, awarded biennially to a book exemplifying critical focus and a novel perspective while remaining accessible to the public, Downs is a great read for specialists and non-specialists alike.

Hahrie Han, an associate professor of political science at Wellesley College, discusses her insights from her book on activism and civic organizations. She reveals that activism is a learned behavior, emphasizing the role of organizations in transforming members into activist leaders. Han introduces the 'activist ladder,' highlighting different levels of political engagement. She also explores the challenges organizations face in fostering civic engagement and the essential role of education in preparing individuals for active citizenship.

How does an author craft a work that speaks across the boundaries of dance studies, Jewish studies and gender studies? What does it mean for dance to function as a site for probing complex questions of racial, ethnic and cultural identity? How do choreographers respond to the prompt, “make a Jewish dance?” What does all of this have to tell us about the ways in which Jewish identities show up onstage both historically and contemporarily? I was grateful to engage these questions with dancer, choreographer and historian, Rebecca Rossen (pronounced “Ross – in”,) author of Dancing Jewish: Jewish Identity in American Modern and Postmodern Dance (Oxford University Press, 2014). Rebecca’s groundbreaking work probes the ways in which American Jewish choreographers use dance as a site to interrogate personal and collective identities while articulating social and political agendas and challenging stereotypes. Rossen critically engages with the work of Anna Sokolow, Pauline Koner, David Dorfman, Liz Lerman and others in examining how they use dance as a space for the creative construction, imagining and re-imagining of Jewish identities. Including over 50 photographs and a companion website with video clips, Dancing Jewish is a resource for dance educators and historians as well. Rebecca Rossen is Assistant Professor of Theatre and Dance at The University of Texas at Austin. A dance historian, performance scholar, and choreographer , her research interests include modern and postmodern dance, stagings of identity in physical performance, and the relationship between research and practice. Her own choreography has been presented in venues throughout her hometown of Chicago, as well as in Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Israel.

On November 29, 1957, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holliday, Zoot Sims, Chet Baker, Sonny Rollins, and a multi-talented young R&B player who played jazz that night, Ray Charles, and others played a benefit concert for the Morningside Recreation Center at Carnegie Hall. Almost a half a century later, these recordings, intended to be played on radio Voice of America, were found in the Library of Congress. The aforementioned artists’ performances were never made available and yet, one set from that night was released, featuring a quartet with pianist Thelonious Monk, saxophonist John Coltrane with Shadow Wilson on drums and Abdul-Ahmed Malik on bass. That recording, on Blue Note records, released in 2005, was a critical and commercial sensation. Monk and Coltrane had played more than 100 shows together the previous five months at the Five Spot Club in New York City and, as Gabriel Solis writes in his thought-provoking multi-disciplinary analysis of their program, that Carnegie Hall concert was “a compendium of what was possible in the jazz conventions of the day and a glimpse of how these jazz conventions could be pushed forward.” The Monk/Coltrane concert set featured two great icons in the history of jazz at different points in their career. Monk had already established himself as a unique, eccentric and groundbreaking composer and performer and bandleader, too (as Solis points out in our interview). John Coltrane was still evolving into one of the most multi-perspectived yet focused and revered players in American jazz. It was, as Solis documents, in many ways a golden age of jazz: besides new recording technologies that afforded the possibility of longer recordings with greater listening fidelity, it was an age of “legendary intensity” when players such as Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Sonny Stitt, Art Blakey, Horace Silver, Max Roach, Benny Golson, Dizzy Gillispie, MJQ, Hank Mobly, Hank Jones, Milt Jackson, Lennie Tristano, and Gerry Mulligan “wrote and played and recorded songs and albums that would challenge their contemporaries and become standards in time.” And, jazz had not “separated” from pop music. People went to clubs to hear live jazz; they went in great numbers to jazz concerts/benefits – and, at the same jazz recordings were being brought into the country’s living rooms to larger and larger audiences. Gabriel Solis, an Associate Professor in Music, African-American studies and Anthropology at the University of Illinois, has written a fascinating volume about the cultural significance of the concert, contextual insights about the serendipitous yet important collaborative bond between Monk and Coltrane, “close reading” musical analyses as to how each piece on their set “played out” with respect to the members of the quartet, and a retrospective look at the significance of the public’s and critical responses to the CD’s release by Blue Note Records in 2005. In Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall (Oxford UP, 2013) Solis discusses whether the popularity of the CD after its release in 2005 is evidence of nostalgic reverence for an era gone by, or a validation that jazz is alive-and-well and more appreciated than ever. Of course, Solis knows it’s far more complicated than that, but he improvises riffs and ruminations that stimulate the reader into pleasing new ponderings about the meaning of “nostalgia,” the “is jazz dead?” question (which Solis notes going back as least as far as 1964), the decline of the jazz clubs, the ascendency of jazz studies in the Academy, and interesting perspectives on Monk’s and Coltrane’s musical development ...

Our moral lives are constructed out of projects, goals, aims, and relationships or various kinds. The pursuit of these projects, and the nurturing of certain relationships, play central role in giving our lives their meaning and value. This much is commonplace. What is not frequently noticed is that our practices of valuing and finding meaning in our lives draw upon the presumption that others will outlive us, that there will be generations of human beings continuing into the future. One way to grasp the significance of this presumption is to imagine a scenario in which we know that humanity has no future. How would this knowledge affect our lives in the present? Would the pursuit of our goals matter? What do our likely reactions to the imagined scenario tell us about value? And what does the envisioned scenario tell us about how we should regard our own death? In Death and the Afterlife (Oxford University Press, 2013), Samuel Scheffler carefully explores these questions. His surprising suggestion is that much of the value that we find in our own lives depends upon inevitability of our own death and the existence of others who will survive us.

Katherine Pickering Antonova‘s An Ordinary Marriage: The World of a Gentry Family in Provincial Russia (Oxford University Press, 2012) investigates the Chikhachevs, members of the middling nobility in the pre-emancipation era. The book’s principal characters are Andrei, a graphomaniacal paterfamilias who (conveniently for historians) enlists his entire family in diary keeping and presides over the education of his son and serfs with love, moral clarity, and despotic meticulousness. And Natalia, the indefatigable khoziaika, who runs the estate, manages the budget, negotiates with serfs, and suffers from numerous hysterical ailments. Andrei and Natalia’s children, the entirely average Aleksei and almost wholly undocumented Aleksandra, round out the family portrait, as does Natalia’s brother and their neighbor, the loquacious Yakov Chernavin (predictably, since no nineteenth-century story of Russian provincial family life is complete without an eccentric and omnipresent bachelor uncle). Like any well-executed microhistory, An Ordinary Marriage looks intensively in a seemingly narrow place in order to get answers to large questions. Close readings of the diaries, articles, and other personal papers left by the Chikhachevs produce fascinating insights about the world of Russia’s gentry: their division of labor, views on serfdom, attitudes toward children and childhood, models of education, habits and feelings surrounding death and mourning, and approaches to medicine and etiology. We also learn about more pleasantly mundane yet highly instructive aspects of middling noble life: literary and philosophical tastes, home remedies, patronage systems, leisure, and everyday religious practice. While Kate explains that she does not see the Chikhachevs as representative, she nonetheless shows convincingly that their values and domestic arrangements were accepted — viewed as “normal” — by provincial Russia. Neighbors, for example, did not worry that Natalia managed the family estate and villages comprised of hundreds of serfs while her husband raised their son and wrote articles at home. The book’s findings, therefore, constitute a significant contribution not only to the study of imperial Russia but also to European gender history, economic history, the history of emotions, and childhood studies.

The idea that the language we speak influences the way we think – sometimes referred to as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – has had an interesting history. It’s particularly associated with the idea that languages dismissed as primitive by 19th century thinkers, such as those of indigenous peoples in America and Australia, are not only as rich and complex as European languages (a now uncontroversial point) but also cause their speakers to conceive of reality in fundamentally different and more sophisticated ways. One problem with this idea, as John McWhorter points out in his new book The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language (Oxford UP, 2014), is that, for there to be ‘winners’, there must also be ‘losers’ – people who are held back by their language. And that’s a much less palatable idea, whether we think that it’s Hopi or English or Chinese speakers that are the ‘losers’. However, McWhorter’s main objection to the Whorfian idea is not that it’s unpalatable, but rather that (as the title of his book suggests) the evidence for it is sketchy. Or, more precisely, although language has been shown to influence cognition in certain ways, none of these are very substantial, and it would be a gross exaggeration to consider that speakers of different languages automatically have different worldviews. In this interview, we talk about the political dimensions of Whorfianism, and discuss some of the evidence for effects of this kind (and how far they go). We touch upon the way in which claims about it are evaluated by linguists, and how the history of linguistics influences how the idea has developed. And we consider the implications for our own view of the world, if the consequences of language were as profound as has been argued.

Ian Haney Lopez is the author of Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (Oxford UP 2014). He is the John H. Boalt Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and on the Executive Committee of the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice. Lopez investigates the often hidden side of racism. He traces the political history of candidates for office using a set of coded phrases, allusions, and references to call attention to race, without ever uttering the word. In the post Brown v. Board era, Lopez argues, candidates learned a new language of strategic racism, substituting anti-government rhetoric for anti-black, anti-Latino, or anti-immigrant. In doing so, the dog whistle was heard as a much wider criticism of the social welfare state, and thus a direct attack not just on minorities, but on the middle class.