totem animals

Over at Village Dog ( scroll view | mosaic view ) I've been keeping a list of "totem animals" - kind of a journal in animal images, or animal avatars perhaps. The idea came from the late great Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who would start off a seminar by asking students to take turns naming their "totem animals," and going around the room reciting each other's totems. I had the privilege of taking my very first graduate course with Eve in the olden days. My totem that day was completely uninspired - I think I just said my Chinese zodiac sign. So this is my attempt to do better. Another day (or two, or three), another ice-breaker.

Here are a few recent entries (strange that sleeping and sound technology seem to be on my mind lately):

#68: Lucian Freud, Eli

#67: Todd Baxter, Fox on Reel to Reels (toile pattern based on photograph)

#65: Charles Dury, young grizzly cub born in Cincinati Zoo, 1870s

#62: Toadfish, from the Reanimation Library visual archive

All 68, altogether.

gold star for settler colonialist paranoia

American culture really hurts my brain sometimes. Imagine poor Catherine Jourdan getting this as a reward for her academic labor.

From Princeton Library's collection of Awards of Merits from the 1820s onward - not sure exactly of the date for this one. Less pedagogically twisted examples here.

flipper, we are not in san diego anymore

Another military animal story: this time a photo essay at Mother Jones. Some of the images are quite surreal. As is the final quote in the caption below. I guess we all have different opinions of what San Diego is like?

"like ghosts, dogs are enigmas"

I'm posting what I hope will be the first of a few passages from Colin Dayan's engrossing new book The Law is a White Dog (chapter 1 available for download).

Dayan's dogs are quite a different lot from the flak-jacketed K9's that have been in the news of late, or the progressive modern pets that grace the pages of the Bark. In this book we find dogs in the company of slaves, prisoners, and detainees - "extraneous persons" on the precipice between being subjects and being nothing. Here we find canis familiaris outside the ideological safe house of sentimental (or, for that matter, military) domesticity...

Howling through the shadows at Hecate’s crossroads, sitting at Pontius Pilate’s feet, snarling at Jesus crucified, or accompanying the souls of the dead to the other side, dogs inhabit both divine and demonic realms. Like ghosts, dogs are enigmas. So speaks Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, haunted by his own thoughts:

Then, suddenly, I heard a dog howl nearby.
Had I ever heard a dog howl like this? My thoughts raced back. Yes! When I was a child, in my most distant childhood:
—then did I hear a dog howl like this. And I saw it too, bristling, its head up, trembling in the stillest midnight when even dogs believe in ghosts.

Ghosts like dogs are drawn to the familiar, the everyday, even as they tend toward the paranormal and supernatural. They appear as if somewhere between the real and supernatural, returning as a nightmare white phantom, a silent shade, or heavy with flesh, overripe and in need. In the meeting of the actual and the imaginary, ghosts and dogs bear down on the world of social relations and morality. Dogs and ghosts constantly cross boundaries, visit what they coveted most in life, counting on the heaviness of things to give them pleasure, to make them grieve. Ultimately, no matter how much they suggest the impalpable or transcendent, ghosts always come in bodies. They never obey the command to be wisps of air, some kind of steam, wet in the night or voices on the wind. (pp 15-16)

See also: this previous post on pit bulls and Dayan's essay "The Dogs"

war animals, finny and furry

A while ago I started a "military animal" bibliography on Zotero to share with a friend who's also interested in the social and cultural studies of dogs. It's definitely dog-heavy, though crows and camels also put in cameos. Most of the items are news stories from the past few years (lots of Bin Laden commando dog stuff of late). Here are a couple gems I've added recently. The first is more humorous ephemera, the latter, less so.

i. WWII submarine insignia
Via All My Eyes: "Due to the stealth nature of submarines, a logo is not displayed on the vessel itself, but it is printed on stationery, made into jacket patches, mess hall items, and home-port flags."




ii. K-9 Storm
Via Amaki09's Tumblr (click images for direct links). Google K9 Storm for more.

the weirdest people in the world?

WEIRD as in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic.

I'm so excited about this acronym, I'll readily admit to not having read the source article yet! Here's the abstract by psychologists Joe Henrich, Steven J. Heine, and Ara Norenzayan of the University of British Columbia:

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world’s top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers - often implicitly - assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species - frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior - hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re‐organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.

Found via Andrew Goldstone's "Race, Ethnicity, Brains" - which is in turn a response to this really intriguing "fairy tale" on cultural neuroscience by Paula Moya. Goldstone and Moya both teach at Stanford.

* Image: inspired illustration of Henrich, Heine, Norenzayan's research by Only Dead Fish.

paperwork explosion (1967)

This is one of the most frightening depictions of technology and work life I've ever seen. Even though it's supposed to be selling a new labor-saving office product. For IBM no less. And it's made by Jim Henson. Vertigo-inducing, yes.

I came upon it via this blog post by the media historian Ben Kafka (not sure of relations to Franz - either way how could he not be interested in paperwork??) The film has a frenzied incantatory quality that Kafka captures perfectly here: 

The voices continue to explain the various features and benefits of IBM office equipment: cordless dictation,  error-free copy, improved typography, increased productivity. “IBM machines can do the work — so that people have time to think — machines should do the work — that’s what they’re best at — people should do the thinking — that’s what they’re best at.” Once again the music accelerates as a series of faces and voices speed across the screen: “Machines should work — people should think — machines — should work — people — should think — machines — should — work — people — should — think.”

Because, god knows, THEY HAVE A PLAN.