Category Archives: Religion

Persianate Universal Histories Turned Upside Down

by Kit Myers

With “Breaking Historiographical Boundaries: Early Modern Persianate Universal Chronicles,” Sholeh Quinn turns upside down the traditional way of examining universal histories of the Ottoman and Safavid empires. Most scholars have inspected these historiographies separately because this is still an emergent area of study. In particular, scholars have often been concerned with the last section of chronicles covering the newly established empire. Quinn’s presentation and broader research, however, turn way from atomized analysis of dynasties within this distinct genre toward an approach that investigates the entire chronicles in a comparative fashion.

Quinn’s paper illustrates the fruitful insight gained from—and broader importance of—comparative work. Such an approach makes us consider what part of the picture have we missed, and in what ways do our assumptions get turned upside down by using such an approach? Quinn’s preliminary research considers both the structure and content of four Persianate universal chronicles under the Ottoman and Safavid empires: 1) Mawlana Shukrullah’s (1459) Bihjat al-tavarikh, 2) Ghiyas al-Din Muhammad Khvandamir’s (1524) Habib al-siyar, 3) Yahya ibn ‘Abd al-Latif Husayni Qazvini’s (1542) Lubb al-tavarikh, and 4) Muhammad Muslih al-Din Lari Ansari’s (1566) Mirat al-advar.

Her analysis of universal history reveals that the four chronicles share numerous sectional and elemental components. Historians included portrayals of creation, biblical prophets, pre-Islamic Persian kings, the life of Muhammad and his immediate successors, subsequent dynasties, and lastly, the current dynasty. In looking at these universal histories, Quinn found that they were even less Ottoman- or Safavid-centric than anticipated. Thus, Quinn argues that they should indeed be considered universal histories rather than dynastic. Despite what one might expect, the authors of these universal histories did not explicitly disparage pre-Islamic figures and rulers. Instead, they narrated a shared or “universal” past, placing Islamic history within a larger historical context. Similarly, the authors were not simply Ottoman and Safavid historians because they in fact had varying roles for multiple dynasties, and thus, they were more accurately Persianate historians.

Indeed, the narratives are not entirely independent historiographical accounts but rather closely related and sometimes overlapping variations, revealing low and porous historiographical boundaries. Yet, Quinn’s close reading of the universal histories—such as the way in which Kayumars, who is said to be the first Persian king and first human, was included in the four texts—also illustrates that historians were not merely copying the first chapters of prior universal histories. Historians worked from previous sources but also inserted their own perspectives, making minor to significant revisions of prior accounts. Without a comparative analysis, scholars could easily miss the ways in which historians recorded universal chronicles that possessed shared and divergent pasts. What becomes clear is that studying universal chronicles not only requires understanding the historical context but also historiographical context.

 

 

 

Humor and Transgression in Mexican Stand Up

By Dorie Perez

Dr. Raquel García, a newly minted doctoral graduate visiting Merced from our sister UC campus, UC Davis, presented work that was part of her recent doctoral defense and long-standing research project. She writes about the political nature of Mexican comedy as something transgressive, a newly popular form of entertainment that comes to Mexico by way of the traditional North American comic’s role as entertainer-come-social commentator. Yet the tropes of stand-up comedy that many American audiences are familiar with – the Jerry Seinfeld-style routine of humorous critique offered up to a crowd looking for both commonality and shocking amusement- are new to Mexican audiences, even in the boundary-pushing performance arts community within Mexico’s cosmopolitan districts. It is a testament to cultural diffusion and the growing space for social critique in a country with strict rules about private and public spheres that stand-up’s popularity as a medium is growing.

García identifies several key elements at play in her analysis. García discusses the role of performance as its own manifestation of transgression from socially-accepted norms in Mexican society. The play-acting, the “just kidding!” qualifiers that comedians add to their politically astute analysis of historical inequities in Mexican society are indeed played for laughs, but their meaning is clear. A strong critique of the role of political and governmental corruption in everyday life, including the dominant power regimes of the narcotic-trafficking cartels that run great swaths of Mexico’s countryside are main targets, even as the comedians themselves equivocate their jokes as mere humor. Comedians Horacio Almada, Manuel Nava and Jürgen Scritto are included in García’s analysis, and her observation of their practice adds an ethnographic layer of analysis to the discourse they have created that reads as a new modality of resistance. All three comedians are centered in Mexico City, and they maintain a social media presence as a way to both reach out to transnational audiences and re-inscribe their work as social commentary meant for both the Twittersphere and the political landscape they live in as Mexican citizens.

In a heavily Catholic country, Almada’s humor that centers on the dogma of the Church and its frequent hypocrisies is a high wire act, yet the responsive nature of his audiences (seen as Youtube footage in García’s presentation) shows that he’s struck a vein of truth that many share and are even eager to have deconstructed. In a passionate fury, he acts out both the argument of the devoted and that of the priest admonishing his flock, asking about heaven and hell and wondering where he will go if he refuses to commit murder but misses Sunday mass. García includes this bit as a moment signifying the comic’s role as arbiter of truth, or rather, a shared frustration, that many social-media savvy, contemporary Mexicans enact within the confines of a more traditional society. Through comedy, García  argues, the pressure valves of duty and propriety are released for both Mexican audiences and a socially-aware comic eager to showcase his vision of the world gone topsy-turvy.

“Unquiet Women” and the Act of Subversion

by Dorie Perez

The subtle differences between the terms inversion, subversion and perversion, presented by seminar discussant Matthew Kaiser, are usually glossed over in speech, terms used interchangeably to mean “othering” or change as a process of fragmentation. The idea of inversion as a movement, often smaller-scale acts than violent political upheaval, is an interesting take on social change and something Susan Amussen presented in her analysis of Early Modern historical works in late September 2014.

Amussen presented what will be one chapter of a book tentatively called “Turning the World Upside Down: Gender, Culture and Politics in Early Modern England,” which builds on the work of her late husband, the historian David Underdown. Continuing the topsy-turvy theme of the Merced Seminar in the Humanities series for Fall semester 2014, she writes of “unruly women” and other deviants who dared to challenge convention in Elizabethan England. “Mannish-women and womanish-men,” patriarchs that failed to uphold their place as lord and master, among other kinds of usurpation of male authority were targets of John Swetnam, a pamphleteer in 1640s England whose social critique often morphed into full-scale misogyny. Pamphlets were the blog post of their era, read and responded to by intellectuals of all stripes; Swetnam’s back and forth argument with other writers, including quite a few female intellectuals, has held up as an example of the transhistorical tension between idealized expectations of womanhood and the subversive play of gender politics in an increasingly changing world, continuing today unabated.

The global social politics of the Early Modern era were present in the Shakespearean play The Taming of The Shrew (1592), a prime example used in Amussen’s analysis of subtle inversions of gender roles that fueled a discourse of inversion from within a dichotomized world of male/female, rich/poor, and young/old – dichotomies first discussed by Mikhail Bahktin in Rabelais and His World (1965). A royal (or rather, royal-adjacent) sex scandal involving the dissolution of Frances Howard’s marriage to the Earl of Essex in 1613 and subsequent remarriage to the Earl of Somerset fueled fears of subversive female comportment, especially when the perversions of witchcraft were said to be involved. Witchcraft, excessive interest in fashion and makeup, as well as sexual desire, were acts by women to subvert their roles at home, in the streets and at Court. Dress was the process by which identity was encoded, and through that signification, the inscription of idealized roles and behaviors. Any subversive activities strayed into the grey area between the normative and empirical Woman, according to a Foucauldian analysis, destabilizing social norms by way of inversion, perversion and subversion.

Dress, and therefore, womanhood, came under intense scrutiny in the Jacobean literary landscape, where any sense of otherness – foreign silks, mystical allusions, ostentatious luxury- was regulated by social stratification. Yellow hoods, and the color itself, were the sign of prostitutes and other fallen women, using the identifiers of the day as an inverted ladder to another social role available to them. The gender boundaries Amussen analyzes are clearly bounded entities regulated by social interaction and royal decree, yet somehow simultaneously inverted on a daily basis in regular acts of autonomy. They, in turn, set the stage for social relationships and tensions that then spill into the geopolitical arena. Amussen’s analysis ultimately concerns these genre-crossing “disorderly women” and their “failed patriarchs,” by whom social norms were transgressed, even as they worked to upkeep them.

Music and Religious Change in Shakespeare’s Tempest

by Peter Vanderschraaf

Katie Brokaw’s essay is the culminating part of her overall book project Staging Harmony, that focuses on important contributions to English drama from 1450-1611. For me, studying Brokaw’s essay is proving both a special treat and a formidable but valuable challenge, coming from philosophy (with scant background in literature) and specializing in branches of moral and political philosophy with roots in the early modern philosophical era that begins almost immediately after the composition of The Tempest (with Grotius’ Free Sea).  Brokaw argues that in The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest Shakespeare’s writes in a “spirit of finding amicable [and not merely peaceful] coexistence between word, art and ritual (p. 4)”. The discussion here focuses on the role of music (and sometimes dance) in The Tempest.

Some questions/comments for consideration:

  1. This essay discusses primarily The Tempest, written in 1610-1611. Is there a special reason for ending the analysis at 1611 (beyond perhaps the fact that The Tempest is one is Shakespeare’s late plays and Shakespeare is the greatest playwright of his and maybe any era to write in the English language)? Staging Harmony will discuss important contributions to English drama from 1450-1611. Historical tidbit: The London Puritans succeed in having the theaters closed in 1642 until the Restoration.
  2. I agree with Brokaw that interpreting The Tempest as a work arguing for accepting a certain diversity of religious belief and practice makes very good sense. I’m wondering about a possible outlier: the Puritans. My impression is that Shakespeare makes no attempt to “bring the Puritans to the table” in The Tempest. If that’s right, a dull explanation is that Shakespeare may have thought there was little point in trying to appeal to this part of his English culture (since the Puritans would at best ignore his art form anyway). But (again if I am right) could there be a more interesting explanation, namely, that Shakespeare is taking a stance regarding the (now old) question of “tolerating the intolerant”? (I think we face this problem all the time.)
  3. Very quick comment/question: As Brokaw observes, James I was fairly tolerant of religious nonconformism even in his own court. But (as I recently discovered) James had quite interesting ideas about sovereignty. Here’s a quote: “The state of monarchy is the supremest thing on earth. For kings are not only God’s lieutenants upon earth, and sit upon God’s throne, but even by God himself they are called gods. . . .” Does Shakespeare express a view about sovereignty in The Tempest? (If not it certainly is not a problem for Brokaw’s project but I thought it might be interesting to know about.)
  4. I found Brokaw’s discussion of how people of the time viewed music and its power particularly striking. As Brokaw observes, they connected music with science (”music of the spheres”) and the occult in ways we’re not used to in our time. Just an observation: I wonder if this is another way in which The Tempest reflects what I keep calling the pre-modern tradition (because unlike in the pre-modern tradition, specific discussion of music is largely absent among the early modern philosophers and my impression is that these days, aesthetics is thought of as a “luxury” specialization.)
  5. Ditto for the short but very interesting discussion of sympathy. In Shakespeare’s time sympathy apparently had a wider meaning than in our time, reflecting harmony between music and the natural world as well as harmony between people. For reasons I don’t know (and maybe Brokaw does), in the English-speaking world I think the scope of our thinking about sympathy became narrower (roughly, for the moderns and maybe for us, to sympathize is to mentally put oneself in the place of another) as it started to make a more explicit and important role in English moral philosophy (such as Hume’s “judicious spectator” and Smith’s “impartial spectator”).
  6. Why bother raising the earlier insubstantial question about time period? Comment: My impression is that Brokaw’s interpretation can be thought of as representing a culmination in England of thought regarding relative toleration of diverse religious belief and practice (and maybe artistic practice)? (For example, as Brokaw observes recusants in James’ time were common and Roman Catholics were able to practice their faith — my impression is that places where Catholics could participate in the mass were like “speakeasies.”) From Brokaw’s essay (which I find compelling) I think one can conclude that Shakespeare advocated what one might call a “great society” view (plug for my philosophy colleague Jerry Gaus) whose members not merely accept but appreciate and learn from their differences (as opposed to a modus vivendi view of pluralism decried by Alasdair MacIntyre). The contemporary counterpart is modern politically liberal society (if you approve of it) or “the degenerate West” (if you don’t). Anyway if this is right so far, then what follows and the philosophical response (and you knew I would try to smuggle in some philosophy) are an interesting contrast. The Thirty Years War begins two years after Shakespeare’s death, the English Civil War starts in 1642 and the early modern philosophical era starts around this time. I wonder if Shakespeare’s The Tempest foreshadows a period of terrible disillusionment (especially among philosophers), Leibniz being a possible exception. We get figures like Grotius and Hobbes trying to develop a natural law that in principle could be detached from religion, Hobbes arguing that religious diversity and freedom of expression are neither desirable for civil peace nor necessary for personal salvation, and later Hume hinting that in the end we don’t need anything like religious belief to explain or to justify government and moral practice. (Leibniz tries maybe for the last time before the 20th century to develop a creed that he thinks all Christians can accept and that can reconcile the various Christian churches.)

 

Mesa of Sorrows

Our inaugural Seminar in the Humanities, “Mesa of Sorrows: Women, Men, and Cycles of Evangelism in the Southwest Borderlands,” featured James Brooks from the School for Advanced Research at Santa Fe. Check out our Storify of the seminar and feel free to continue the conversation by commenting below or using the hashtag #topsyturvy on Twitter.

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