claro3 said:
W/ a book like Secret History, is it worth reading, or is it better to just make a list of the primary sources used & go straight to those? In general, how do you use a book that’s meh, but has good sources — read it or skip straight to the bibliography?
“going straight to those [primary sources]” isn’t an option for the majority of people.
Most of the bibliography you’re going to find in the back of that book is locked away in academic journals, pay-for-PDF sites, physical archives the general rabble will never be allowed into, and other forms of something we will now address:
Gatekeeping.
A randomly selected source from the bibliography of “Secret History” that I just flipped to is “History of the Khorezm…” translated and annotated by Yuri Bregel.
Here’s what you can get of it online-JSTOR, a site that only allows the intellectually curious unaffiliated with an organization that incidentally costs thousands of dollars per year THREE “free” reads of articles per month or so.
In the United States, knowledge costs money. EXORBITANT amounts of money. Amounts that have been doubling and tripling in recent years.
Secondly, “primary sources” are literally things written AT THE TIME, a.k.a. documents from the 1100s and 1200s, usually not in English. Sometimes translations are available, sometimes they aren’t. This may come as a surprise, but I don’t speak Medieval Mongolian. I also do not have access to the locked and climate-controlled rooms where these documents are kept.
I honestly wonder if I make it look too easy…I do hours upon hours of going through archives of catch-all databases of Medieval Art to find even one piece that falls under the jurisdiction of this blog. All too often I reach dead ends, endless text descriptions with no actual image of the piece in question, and chase my own tail across the entire internet.
In short, there is no “just go look at the primary sources”.
To even more fully understand how deep this rabbit hole goes, i present you this link:
This article on how Social Media Setting can Subvert Gatekeeping is only available by paying $157.00.
This article on Social Media and gatekeeping can be accessed once for 15.00; a membership will run you well over $100.
A secondary for of Gatekeeping is the use of language so formal and pedantic that no mere mortal could ever hope to strain themselves to understand what the everloving heckballs the writer is even referring to. For example, this article while technically “accessible”, is not very “accessible” at all:
The process of translation and interpretation from this narrow core is far from fair and egalitarian. Indeed there are some voices that may be heard louder than others and some that may be heard for longer and for a variety of reasons. And, because artworlds are indeed networks, factors attributable to growth of connectivity and value in networks, such as power law distribution (Barabási 2002: 70-72) can apply with respect to how well-known or how popular particular artists, artifacts, acts or publics can become.
I hope you read that Barabási paper.
In summation, I’m trying to tear down the lack of access to this information.
That’s why I’m on tumblr.
What I’m doing here is generally…well, let’s just say I take some risks.
I always knew you work super hard for this site but I guess I never realized just HOW MUCH work goes into this. thank you so much for maintaining this blog, what you’re doing is so crucial
Thank you very much. :)
I mean, to clarify, I don’t really have any more access to this stuff than anyone who’s reading this blog, less actually than many of my followers.
I’ve been in a sort of academic no-man’s-land for about a year; I have a degree but am still technically an Undergraduate. I work at a college and have access to materials, but my hands are often bound by copyright laws. For much the same reason that your professor cannot legally give you access to textbooks you haven’t bought. You understand?
Now, happily, I’m ensconced in one of those elite NorthEastern Institutions that looks like flippin Hogwarts, and I’m hoping to get delicious access to all the awesome database perks generally associated with such a grandiose demonstration of wealth.
Technically this blog isn’t an “Art History” blog, it’s an Art Historiography blog. Historiography is the study and analysis of how “history” becomes what it is: who writes it, who creates it, who distributes it and who is accountable for the way it is taught.
Anyhow if anyone would like to
check out this post and more importantly,
sign this petition, this blog may be around for longer and my chances of becoming a felon will be greatly reduced. I hope.
Also, you don’t need to be a U.S. citizen to sign the petition.
wednesdaythursdayfridayme:
medievalpoc:
I have to say not all cultures placed as much emphasis in skin colour as -what is known as- western europe…. and when they did discuss skin colour, it doesn’t automatically translate to: skin colour meant one thing and one thing only. ALWAYS! Assuming or interpreting all material evidence and written sources of non-european, or pre-european, cultures in one way, is at the very best speculative.
A. Chapin, whose page in Academia.edu has many interesting articles, argues in favour of an interpretation of the Minoan figures according to the available material. Since the experts on the field of Minoan studies do NOT interpret skin colour as relevant to social status, then it is possible that there are no evidence linking skin colour to social hierarchies in Minoan society. In fact, the aforementioned scenario is a lot likelier, than the they-are-all-bigoted-racist-idiots explanation. This is not to say that it is certain skin colour was NOT associated with social hierarchies, but some evidence to support a different thesis (or hypothesis) IS necessary.
In addition, what the first commenter wrote about the male-female hypothesis and how it is stupid, because:
(A) the Minoan society was male oriented, and
(B) the figures do not look female
are not particularly efficient observations, because for one thing it is not certain that the Minoan society was ‘male oriented’ and of course male oriented does not mean the same thing across time and space. There were -and still are-, in fact, many male-dominated societies where the female figure held/ holds considerable power. Eastern Mediterranean is full of cultures which placed considerable importance in women, not only in religion, but also legally and socially. Moreover, what looks male or female in art is not always as obvious, especially if the artists are depicting very young individuals. Consequently, Chapin’s observations that age needs to be clarified before engaging in any meaningful conversation about gender or some sort of ethnic background, are in deed invaluable.
In conclusion, seeing a figure with darker skin colour in the art of some people and seeing ‘race’ as it has been discussed in modern and contemporary western societies, is a bad interpretation of the original culture. Living under the presumption of race within a cultural system and treating said system and its values as universal social givens, is also a bad interpretation of other cultures (and only -ironically- furthers cultural imperialism and the appropriation of other cultural systems and their subsequent expressions). Expressing the hypothesis, or thesis, that skin colour could be linked to social hierarchies is a valid statement worth looking into it and looking for evidence to test the original hypothesis. Lots and lots of evidence.
“worth looking into”=/=“to the exclusion of all other possibilities”
To quote myself:
none of what I have found has included “Because they have different skin colors.”
Also, yes. Minoan culture was fairly woman-centric and possibly matriarchal. There’s a fair amount of evidence that all three of these figures are women.
The bottom line is, you’re mistaking me for a historian when I am in fact practicing historiography.
You want to move the goalposts of this discussion back to the territory of “history”: what this painting meant to the Minoans who created it.
This conversation is about existing historical interpretations of this paintings, the people who made these interpretations, and how their interpretations affect us, right now. Students, now. Educators, now.
I’m not trying to bring “history to life” for my readers.
I’m trying to bring my readers to life for historians and history education.
I’m trying to remove the muzzle that too many educators place on students like dontusewordsidontunderstand’s professor did:
dontusewordsidontunderstand reblogged this from beyondvictoriana and added:
This is one of the best posts ever. I brought all this into a discussion of Othello and the prof smacked me down way hard. :\
That’s what this blog is about.
That is erasure.
That is the powerful silencing dissent.
That is how the status quo is maintained.
My blog is about creating a space for the silenced student. My blog is about putting the educator under the microscope. My blog is about interaction and critical thinking, not demanding that students become a silent receptacle for unquestioned “Facts”.
This blog is an adventure.
(via bluepimpernel-deactivated201405)
For real though, thank you for all of the time and research you put into this blog. Up until recently, which is rather embarrassing to admit, I wasn't aware of the prevalence of PoC in Europe prior to that whole slave thing that certain parts of the US are now trying to erase from our history books.... yeahhh... I just wanted to drop a line and let you know how appreciated you are since I'm still trying to get rid of my white blindness.
Thanks!
There’s a lot to learn; the problem is the amount of effort that’s gone into obscuring it.
More on the American erasure of “that whole slave thing” as you so blithely put it…
Rewriting History: Erasing White Guilt from American Textbooks
Judge Upholds Law Banning “Ethnic Studies” Classes
More on Arizona’s “Ethnic Studies” Ban
Tennessee Tea Party Demands That References to Slavery be Removed from History Textbooks
Texas’s Revisionist Stranglehold on the American Public Education Curriculum
Texas Conservatives Win Battle Over Textbook Content
Texas School Board Rewrites US History with Lessons Promoting god and Guns
Hume’s claim that no non-Whites had contributed to civilization or the arts was taken as established fact. Jews and Catholics or Protestants, depending on who was doing the writing, were also suspect, but, as Popkin (1973) states, it was particularly “people of color [who] just did not have the right things going on in their heads to qualify as man in the philosophical sense” (p. 250).
Although overt here, today this sort of thinking is covertly embedded in much of what has been called elitist aesthetic and art education theory.
Why did racism, egocentrism, ethnocentrism, and Eurocentrism develop?
Why were European explanations of human diversity evaluative and not neutral? Why could educators such as Clarke and Zerffi write what they did?
Popkin (1973) posits that because Europeans had given up Biblical humanism (the conviction that everyone was made in the image of God) and because naturalistic explanations of human nature allowed for normative evaluation and the economics of slavery, colonization, and gold could be justified:
“And to nobody’s surprise, the theorizers … managed to find that people with "wrong,"or "inferior"mental properties just happened to have the wrong skin color, or the wrong religious beliefs and practices. In finding this out, the philosophers and natural philosophers were not being aberrational; they were acting as the theoreticians for a major stream of thought [e.g., aesthetic theory] that was transforming the universalistic conception of man into a view of the gradations of mankind, a transformation that could justify what was occurring. (Popkin, 1973, p. 254)”
And, it could justify what happened in art education, too.
It is not my purpose in this paper to present rationalizations for the past; however, I believe that we need to understand the past in order to embrace the future. The future for art education in a pluralist society requires art educators who are knowledgeable about and sensitive to students’ differing cultural backgrounds, values, and traditions.
I believe that we need art educators who demonstrate respect for cultures and backgrounds different from their own and acknowledge that all groups can produce and define cultural artifacts that are “excellent” and that in all cultures “art"exists for rather similar reasons. We need art teachers who provide a classroom atmosphere in which students’ cultures are recognized, shared, and respected. We need art educators who will develop culturally appropriate curricula materials to supplement those whose treatment of different cultural groups is limited or biased.
We need art educators who will give students an opportunity to explore what they do not know or understand about the arts of other cultures. We need learning and teaching to operate in both directions and to involve parents and other community members as experts and resource people in classroom activities.
As Shapson (1990) states, "Attempts to implement new curriculum and innovative teaching for multicultural education are fragile. The efforts of committed educators and other stakeholders stand vulnerable to political pressures” (p. 213). As I have shown in this paper, we are also vulnerable to powerful and ingrained traditions in art education. We all need to examine our own beliefs and values so that we can effect change in the ways we teach art.
The Origins of Racism in the Public School Art Curriculum
F. Graeme Chalmers
Studies in Art Education, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Spring, 1992), pp. 134-143