Beyond Rivalry - girardian_anthropology

Mimesis, Psych 201 and Jeans

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 10:27:01 -0500

Deep Glamour's "What Your Jeans Say About You" (other than, "These are the only ones I could find that fit me ...") reports on a ground-breaking study in the Journal of Consumer Research that finds that our 'attachment' styles determine what jeans we wear:

"See, when you were but a wee babe in your mother's arms you honed one of two attachment styles, 'anxiety and avoidance,' the authors explain. Anxious people view themselves as positive or negative and avoidance people view others as positive or negative.

'Anxiously attached individuals are more influenced by "brand personalities," the idea that a brand possesses humanlike traits, such as sincerity or excitement. "Because of a low view of self, anxious individuals use brands to signal their ideal self-concept to future relationship partners and therefore focus more on the personality of the brand," the authors write.'

The study seems to look only at people whose styles are attachment-related anxiety and attachment-related avoidance. The study summary says nothing about the jeans preferences of people whose 'attachment style' isn't anxiety, i.e., those with a 'secure' style; how do they make these ultra-important decisions? I couldn't find a free version of the full-text article to learn more.

The reason…

Who Deserves What?

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 14:29:00 -0500

PD James' latest Dalgliesh crime novel, The Private Patient (2008), is set largely in Devon at a manor house-cum-plastic surgery center. Central themes seem to include worthiness and what we deserve, revenge, redemption, forgiveness, the inability to forgive.

When the book opens, the reader is in the mind of the soon-to-be murder victim, Rhoda, and after her death, at various times we're privy to the thoughts and feelings of a number of other characters, including suspects and police. Rhoda turns out to be a rather single-minded and self-focused woman whose actions have been at least partially responsible for others' pain and harm, and by allowing us the victim's pov at the start, I think James aids our ability to sympathise with her.

Speaking of her family of origin, Rhoda recalls:

"Those outbursts of violence, the impotent rage, the shame, had done for them all. The important things had been unsayable. And looking into her mother's face, she asked herself how could she begin now? She thought her mother was right. It couldn't have been easy for her father to find that five-pound note week after week. It had come with a few words, sometimes in shaky handwriting: With love from Father.…

Delusions, Illusions

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 05:12:00 -0500

Reading lots, between my inter-library loaned crime novels -- finished Tana French's The Likeness last week, am reading PD James' new Dalgleish novel, The Private Patient, now, and have Reginald Hill's The Price of Butcher's Meat to read afterwards -- and the arrival of the Wall Street Journal through the door slot almost every day, a little 6-month perk for having completed about 200 online surveys in the last few years ... I love the WSJ, its editorial board notwithstanding.

Here are a couple of recent gems from its pages:

***

Destructive Delusions: How therapists and 'victims' seized on the idea of repressed memory, leveling false charges and ruining lives, by Theodore Dalrymple, a book review of Dr. Paul McHugh's Try to Remember: Psychiatry's Clash Over Meaning, Memory, and Mind. Best lines:

"One of the most extraordinary outbreaks of popular delusion in recent years was that which attached to the possibility of 'recovered memory' of sexual and satanic childhood abuse, and to an illness it supposedly caused, Multiple Personality Disorder. No medieval peasant praying to a household god for the recovery of his pig could have been more credulous than scores of psychiatrists, hosts of therapists and thousands of willing victims."…

The Likeness

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 13:47:00 -0500

Just finished The Likeness by Tana French, which follows on her evocative debut of last year, In the Woods, both set in Ireland. The Likeness would be a great readlike for Donna Tartt's The Secret History, with its focus on a closely knit group of college-aged students (grad-school-aged, in this case) who have secrets.

French's writing and emotional sensitivity are both superb.

The elements that most interested me are the thread of sacrifice woven throughout the book, French's evocation of sadness, and her portrayal of the settled, harmonious, familial, habitual, insidious, dysfunctional, oppressive, romanticised and idealised relationships and lifestyle among the five friends. I think that besides sacrifice, one of the major themes of the book is home: what constitutes home, family, the places we are free, the places we are held; and how some people sacrifice everything to create home, and some feel it a threat they have to run from, and some never find it, and some luck into it for a week, a year, a decade, a lifetime.

Sacrifice

"I don't tell people this, it's nobody's business, but the job is the nearest thing I've got to a religion. The detective's god is the truth, and you don't…

The Bali Bombers, Mimesis and Me

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 11:50:00 -0500

I've been reading in recent weeks about the so-called Bali Bombers, three men -- two brothers (commonly called Amrozi and Mukhlas) and an Imam/computer technician -- who were tried and found to be instrumental in the killing of 202 people -- most of whom were foreign nationals, including 88 Australians -- -- at nightclubs in a tourist area on the Indonesian island of Bali [in green] in 2002, to protest the US-led invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. (Bali is overwhelmingly Hindu, however.) Another 209 people were injured. (More at Wikipedia)

For their roles in the crime, their execution, which may occur by this weekend has now occured, will be by ritualised firing squad on another Indonesian island, off Java, the spot (or perhaps three separate spots) in the woods already decked out with chairs and crosses, after five years of legal appeals that apparently the bombers themselves had no interest in, as they have said throughout that they are ready and happy to die as martyrs, preferrably by beheading, in the Islamic way. They admit the crime and show no remorse but have apologised for killing Indonesian Muslims during the attacks.

Meanwhile, their family and other supporters are surging towards the…

Our Sins Will Be Our Glory

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 15:49:00 -0400

I'm re-reading James Alison's Raising Abel: The Recovery of the Eschatalogical Imagination. Alison speaks of the importance of the Resurrection as a subversion of our human story (which is framed by death) -- and not as the abolition of the human story -- and as "including that which is capable of being rescued and transformed: the human story of violence and victimization," and he calls to mind the English mystic Julian of Norwich in this context:

"Julian of Norwich ... affirms that in heaven our sins will be not shame, but glory to us. This seems to me to be the authentically Catholic intuition. I try to make sense of it in terms of the transvestite prostitutes whom I knew in Brazil when they were in the final phrase of their struggle with AIDS. I hope to know them again in heaven, not so transmogrified that their personal life story has been, in each case, abolished, but rather so utterly alive that their fake beauty, arduously cultivated, their sad personal stories of envy, violence, frustration in love, and their illness have become trophies which are not sources of shame, but which add to their beauty and joy."

And oh, that we…

Collective Violence - Examples - Part VIII

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 06:16:00 -0400

It's been six weeks since I last blogged about mob violence. I've been away most of that time, but no matter where we go or what we're doing, collective violence continues in many forms. Below are some of the latest incidents reported as mob violence or mob justice. (And here's why I'm doing it.)

August to the present (also December 2007, and in 1999): Violence against Christians continues in Orissa, on India's east coast, since the 23 Aug. assassination of a Hindu swami Laxmanananda Saraswati and four of his followers: "Though Maoist insurgents took credit for the killing, Hindu extremists blamed Christians. They mounted mob attacks on churches, as well as homes and villages populated by Christians. More than 100 people reportedly have been beaten, hacked or burned to death since the mob violence began. It is estimated tens of thousands of Christians have fled their homes, many remaining in seclusion in forests and others in relief camps with police guards. ... Christians reportedly make up about 2.4 percent of the state's 36.7 million people." A BBC news report mentions the religious rivalry of the region: "Hindu groups have long accused Christian priests of bribing poor tribes and low-caste Hindus to…

the Good with the Bad, Taking

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 06:40:00 -0400

"Many who burnt heretics in the ordinary way of their business were otherwise excellent people."

-- G. M. Trevelyan, 'Bias in History'

Anarchic Mercy

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 08:35:00 -0400

Love this, from Rowan Williams via Inhabitatio Dei:

"To believe in Jesus' God, the God of unconditional accessibility and even-handed compassion, to believe in an anarchic mercy that ignores order, rank and merit, is to accept that our projects and patterns are the mark of failure, of illusion, of the infantile belief that we can dictate truth and reality. Because it is menacing and painful to be confronted with the knowledge that our constructions of controlled sense are liable to be empty self-serving, we readily turn to violence against the bearers of such knowledge: in Johannine terms, we have decided that we want to stay blind when the light is there before us, claiming we can see perfectly well." -- Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge (1990)

The Intersection of Terror and Glamour

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 06:00:00 -0400

Deep Glamour has a provocative post about the relationships among glamour, heroism, martyrdom, desire, violence, and terror.

It begins by quoting author Salman Rushdie, who, when asked about the causes of terrorism, suggested: "a misconceived sense of mission," a 'herd mentality,' the desire to become 'a historic figure,' an attraction to violence, and -- shocking the interviewer -- glamour. ... 'The suicide bomber's imagination leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fact he is simply blowing himself up pointlessly and taking other peoples lives.'"

Blogger Virginia Postrel continues:

"To someone who thinks 'glamour' means movie stars and designer dresses, the idea that terrorism is glamorous sounds bizarre. But Rushdie is wise to the deeper meaning of glamour, as a form of magic and persuasion. Glamour is in the audience's eyes, and the phenomenon long preceded Hollywood. ... Glamour can sell religious devotion or military glory as surely as it can pitch lipstick or island vacations. All promise a way to transcend our everyday circumstances, to experience more and become better than ordinary life allows. All invite us to imagine escape and transformation. ... Glamour appeals to our desires, whatever they may be."

Glamour, in other words,…