History, Memory, Music, Uncategorized

Native Hawaiian Music and Cultural Capital in 19th Century Whaling

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By Jasmine Marshall Armstrong

When men went to sea in the nineteenth century whaling industry, they entered a working environment which was not only dangerous, demanding, and dirty, but also a space of cosmopolitan exchange with other sailors, according to Dr. James Revell Carr, an ethnomusicologist from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Carr recently presented “‘Selamoku Hula’: Native Hawaiian Music and Dance at Sea in the 19th Century” as part of the Merced Seminar in the Humanities. As part of his presentation, Carr taught those in attendance a chantey entitled “John Kanaka,” whose title refers to Native Pacific Islanders working on American whaling ships. “Kanaka” is a Hawaiian term for “human being.” Research into the origins of “John Kanaka,” which was used by sailors when hauling up the sails, led Carr to speculate that the song’s Hawaiian lyrics which included the term “stand your ground,” were in part instructions to keep one’s feet firmly on the decking in order to maintain safety standards.

Today, “John Kanaka” is learned by numerous school children, and is sung by park rangers and volunteers from the San Francisco Martime National Historical Park, where Carr previously worked as an interpretive specialist. The original meaning and context of the song did not begin to become apparent to Carr until an elderly woman approached him after a performance and introduced herself as a Native Hawaiian. In his book, “Hawaiian Music in Motion: Mariners, Missionaries and Minstrels,” Carr writes that the woman told him her father was a stevedore in Honolulu, who sang songs combining Hawaiian words with English sailors’ expressions such as “by gum” and “ahoy.” This piqued Carr’s interest, and was the impetus for the research project which lead to his book.

Beyond a means of inclusion within the whaling work space, Native Hawaiian music became an important part of cultural circulation and exchange on the seas. Carr said that whaling ships would often meet up in the waling grounds, during which sailors would trade scrimshaw, books, and music. One mariner’s diary he read an excerpt from noted that during an occasion in which his ship met up with several others, mariners sang songs representing their nationalities and  ethnicities, including Hawaiians. Another sailor, from New England, used his personal copy book to record in Hawaiian a song he learned from Native Hawaiian whalers. The sailors noted that they looked forward to impressing others with their knowledge of a Hawaiian song, reflecting the concept of cultural capital.

While Native Hawaiians were looked down upon by missionaries and those in the sugar plantation trade, in whaling, the working class masculine culture was based around mutual respect for hard work among sailors. “It mattered less if you were American or Hawaiian or English,” Carr said. “What mattered was if you worked hard, and had skills in seamanship, and bravery when facing the whale.” American missionaries attempted to keep Native Hawaiians working on the sugar plantations in Hawaii, but journals and letters Carr has found indicate that most preferred working at sea, where they were treated with more respect, and their culture was appreciated.

Although the cosmopolitan age of the whaling ships ended in the latter half of the nineteenth century, elements of native Hawaiian songs sung at sea continue to appear, whether reinterpreted as music for children or as a popular wedding song. Few Americans today are aware that Hawaiian music has a long history of popularity and inclusion in the repertoire of American popular music, Carr noted. Yet it was Hawaiians who “gave the world a unique combination of sliding steel guitar, driving ukulele, falsetto yodels, and loping, syncopated rhythms that have influenced America since the 1890s at least,” he wrote.

Anthropology, Art, Geography, History

Water Architecture: When Aesthetics Mirrors Social Values

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By Jasmine Marshall Armstrong

When most people look at a pumping station or dam along California’s intricate water supply systems, they may think of technology, drought and the Golden State’s insatiable thirst.

Rina Faletti, a Postdoctoral Scholar for the UC Merced Center for Humanities and an art historian who studies the history of urban water systems, sees much more.

Trained in landscape theory and cultural geography at the University of Texas, Austin, where she received her doctorate, when Faletti looks at the 1910 neoclassical Sunol Water Temple in southern Alameda County, she sees an embodiment of the values of the culture which designed and built these water supply features into the temple’s architectural details.

“When someone looks at or imagines a ‘landscape’—whether it is a landscape painting or a garden, ‘wilderness’ or ‘nature’—that viewer perceives ideas and feels emotions that are a reflection of that culture’s ideas about what is beautiful and valuable,” Faletti explained. “My contention is these buildings were just as important as banks or churches, in their time, in conveying values.”

Using the example of the Sunol Water Temple, designed by Willis Polk in 1910 and built by the Spring Valley Water Company, which provided water service for San Francisco from 1860 – 1930, Faletti noted that neoclassical designs for waterworks structures shape the way we think about water.

“Viewers might admire the temple form of the buildings, and in turn admire the patrons of the buildings; in a sense this is a way in which art has been used to ground the public support of industrial capitalism, as a basis for American urban development. From another point of view, just as valid, the associations with ancient Greece and Rome confirm political foundations of a representative republic. Third, the neoclassical aesthetic permits an association with the Romans, whom American culture traditionally laud as being the most forward-thinking engineers in history. These are just three possible ways to interpret the aesthetic form of a neoclassical waterworks structure on a city water supply system,” she explained.

In her studies of water architecture in the American West, Faletti confronts the mythos of the landscape as something to be conquered and dominated, a philosophy writ large by historian Fredrick Jackson Turner during his 1893 talk on the significance of frontier during the Chicago World’s Fair.

“Turner interpreted the West in Romantic terms. The idea viewed settlers and explorers as independent heroes who represented Americans as a whole, who conquered a hostile land by continuously and ceaselessly moving across it,” Faletti noted. The American West was postulated as a ‘savage’ landscape in need of ‘civilization,’ and this point of view ignored the cultures of Native Americans, which already existed, and other perspectives besides those of male explorers and historians, Faletti said.

The “civilizing” values suggested by Greco-Roman water temples of the 19th and early 20th centuries also gave way to a romantic look backward at California’s own past in the Mission architecture of some water conveyance structures. Just east of Merced, beside Highway 140, sits a Pacific Gas and Electric substation built during this period which Faletti said provides a great example of Mission Revival in historic water architecture.

As the 20th Century moved into the Art Deco period, dams built as water reclamation projects often featured ornamental details and motifs. One such dam was the Hollywood Reservoir’s 1924 Mulholland Dam, named for Los Angeles Department of Water and Power engineer William Mullholland.

“It could be seen from everywhere in Hollywood,” Faletti said.

Today, the beauty of the dam is no longer visible, for a surprising reason: The failure of another Mulholland dam. In 1928, the St. Francis Dam, spanning the San Francisquito Canyon 40 miles north of Los Angeles, collapsed, resulting in a catastrophic flood which killed as many as 600 people.

Following the St. Francis Dam failure, the Department of Water and Power covered the Mullholland Dam with millions of acre feet of dirt backfill, according to Faletti. This took place during the height of the Great Depression, a time when Californians’ confidence in the state had been undermined.

“The politics of buttressing a dam that did not need bolstering were about the public perception of safety, not actual structural soundness,” Faletti said. Echoing her contention that a time period’s and a community’s values are reflected in its water architecture, Faletti noted that one engineer at the time denigrated aesthetic design elements of dams, which he saw as “feminine.”

Faletti said her scholarship has been enhanced by her time as a Postdoctoral Fellow for the Center for the Humanities at UC Merced, and noted how much she enjoys refining her water architecture scholarship.

“Water and power are beautiful problems to have, and both as human and as technological problems, they are not going away anytime soon. My job is to observe, record, and comment on the process, and it’s a privilege to provide that service to humanity,” she said.

Uncategorized

Vanesha Pravin: A Poet Explores the Transnational

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By Jasmine Marshall Armstrong

Recently, The Center for the Humanities at UC Merced hosted a poetry reading and book signing for Merritt Writing Program faculty member Vanesha Pravin, whose book Disorder was published in 2015 and won the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Sarton Poetry Prize.  We spoke with Pravin about her training as a poet, her love of writing about everyday objects, and the influence of a transnational family with roots in Asia, Europe, Africa and North America:

In press for your award, Robert Pinsky noted, “a central challenge for American art has been the confluence of immigrant histories. Rising above the conventional approaches to that material, urgent and severe, Vanesha Pravin’s Disorder attains a global and historical perspective uniquely personal yet wide-ranging.” Could you discuss whether concepts of transnational or cosmopolitan identities have played a role in your development as a writer? If so, how?

The poems span four continents – North America, Asia, Africa, and Europe. My mother went through four citizenships, my father went through three, and I also have two passports. Since I spent half of my childhood in England and the other half on the East Coast with parents who were mostly raised in Uganda and Tanzania, I feel like I’m a hybrid of different identities. These European, Indian, American Southern, and New England sensibilities all shape the way I interpret the world and capture this interpretation through language. Partly from the influence of different languages, but also having had, at one point, a British accent, and at another point a Southern accent, I’m sensitized to sound, rhythm, and cadence, and attuned to the sound patterns of language.

Several of the poems in Disorder take readers into the past based upon everyday objects the speaker in the poems encounters, such as the trading cards from boxers from 1910 in The Pharmacist’s House. Can you discuss the role objects have in your writing? Do they seem to have a life of their own?

Many objects have longer lifespans than humans. When the speaker finds the trading cards, she is thinking about their origin, too. Who bought these cards? The boy who spent hours sifting through them and then, in time, abandoned them, moved away, forgot about them, aged and died. When you hold vintage objects, you’re reminded of your own mortality because when you think about the objects in their original settings, you’re aware that they have outlived their owners. So yes, the objects do seem to have a life of their own. When you’re dusting an object like the wooden elephant in the opening poem, you have a whole range of associations that that particular object triggers for you, but the object also exists independently of your own associations. It usually means something very different for another observer who projects a different set of associations onto it. In that respect, the object can be like a talisman for the different people who possess it.

How long have you been writing poetry and when did you first consider yourself a poet?

I’ve been writing poetry since I was a child (with long breaks since then), but I didn’t commit to it as a vocation until I was a young adult.

What kind of training do you have as a poet? Did you study under particular poets? How did they influence you?

I learned a lot from reading widely and studying books on prosody throughout my formative years. I also took creative writing workshops and classes, and attended readings by poets like Adrienne Rich, Margaret Atwood, and Louise Glück. Later I took poetry workshops with David St. John and Holly Prado, and worked one-on-one with the poet Laurel Ann Bogan. Then I went to grad school at Boston University, where the training was rigorous and I was able to study under Robert Pinsky, Maggie Dietz, and Louise Glück.

Each writer has taught me something invaluable that has shaped me as a poet. Laurel Ann Bogen taught me how to “find the poem.” Sometimes the poem gets buried and you have to dig it out from the mass of text. You might have written a page and a half, but the poem only comes alive in the 3rd stanza and the rest is superfluous, so you have to ruthlessly cut. At BU I was pleasantly surprised, shocked even, at how generous my professors were with their time, giving us extensive feedback and critiquing our revisions. Robert Pinsky was wonderful – an incredibly supportive mentor. I’ll never forget a long letter he sent me with spot-on feedback, which was instrumental in helping me think through the blocks in my work. He advised me to go Zen with certain poems because he thought the readers needed a break between the more intense poems, and that turned out to be essential in figuring out the organization for my book. Robert also introduced me to the work of poets I’d never heard of, like Fulke Greville. Maggie Dietz was also a great teacher. She led workshops on topics like meter and publication, and through those workshops I became much more aware of the subtleties of craft. She also taught me the value of exercising restraint, which really influenced me when I was shaping Disorder. Louise Glück was a force and terrifyingly psychic when it came to dissecting the work. She once spent 50 minutes critiquing one of my poems — I felt like I was going to pass out by the end, but I absorbed it all and internalized the feedback in such a way that the poem took a radical new turn during revision. Louise would also conference with grad students on weekends, spending an hour with each of us. She was also very supportive of my thesis. You hold on to those words of encouragement after you leave BU, during the long droughts where nothing happens and you process rejection after rejection.

In the back of Disorder is an appendix: a family tree. Why did you decide to include this element in your book?

The book has so many characters that it would have been difficult for most readers to map out the relationships without the tree. I struggled for a long time trying to find the right order for the poems. It didn’t work well to have the poems arranged chronologically. So the poems jump back and forth in time – the juxtapositions of past and present turned out to be essential in creating both momentum and highlighting the constant intrusion of the past into the present. So, since the reader already has to do some work figuring out the timeline, I wanted the tree there to at least provide some clarity about who the characters are.

Several poems in Disorder discuss first and second wives in the family history of the speaker. Could you comment on writing about the complicated relationships among women in families depicted in your book?

Well, we’re talking about a time and a culture where you did what you had to do to survive. As a descendent, I was born in a time when I was able to take a Women’s Studies class at 16, so I had to be careful not to write exclusively and patronizingly from the perspective of a 21st century, educated woman. The second wife is also 16-years-old, the daughter of a poor farmer who can’t afford to keep her, and he arranges a marriage for her. From a young age, she is made aware that, as a girl, she is a burden to the father who must find another home for her. She is expected to develop the coping mechanisms and adapt to this awkward situation, and also to respect the first wife, her elder. Poverty doesn’t grant you the luxury of stewing in your feelings. The first wife is also forced to face the reality of her situation – since she can’t bear children, she understands that she must find an alternative and accept the new family dynamic. She knows the second wife will finally bring children into the family. Obviously, there weren’t many options for women in that era, so these women developed the means to acclimate and minimize the drama. There weren’t the daily catfights that you might see in a contemporary reality TV show.

In the case of the two wives in Disorder, after the children come, there is also the daily grind of survival with the additional pressure of young children, so it was imperative that they find a way to make it work and get on with the business of living. The second wife, by nature, was levelheaded and not a complainer, and any resentment harbored by the first wife did not interfere with their joint efforts to run the household. So the challenge for me was to write from their perspectives, and not to turn it into an ethnographic study.

In several poems, including “Sleep, Wake, Sleep,” you write about the Central Valley. How does the local landscape and its peoples influence your poetry?

I spent a lot of time walking through fields and orchards, and taking country drives just to clear my mind. It’s meditative — observing the things of the world that go unnoticed. I love the stimulation of cities, but I also love being refreshed by a space where there isn’t a single human being in sight. Although the Central Valley landscape is the backbone of that poem, it’s not really about the Central Valley – and with any mention of people, I was referring to humans in general. Writing “Sleep, Wake, Sleep,” I was thinking of those drives out in the middle of nowhere where the sky overtakes the land and you can successfully, almost effortlessly, distance yourself from the network of humans. You see maybe a town on the horizon, and you feel insulated from the sort of madness that comes from rampant over-sharing, which has become a poor substitute for authentic connection. That madness in our culture is muted by time spent in the natural world.

What are you working on now as a writer?

I’ve got a few projects that I’m working on, but I’m focused on revising another collection of poems. It’s a very different animal from Disorder, so I’m not applying the same writing strategies and criteria that I relied on for that book. This means I have to be somewhat ruthless with my own work, discarding what I would have gladly preserved in the past. This is simultaneously an invigorating and unnerving experience, to acknowledge that I’m right back at the beginning, hunting for meaning and sense.

Uncategorized

Flood Management in Late Imperial China

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By Jasmine Marshall Armstrong

How are people impacted by living beside water, and what impact do they exert upon water? What counts as disaster? Ruth Mostern explored these questions in a talk for the Center for the Humanities this fall, “Engineering Empire: The Theory and Practice of Yellow River Flood Management in Late Imperial China.” She noted that for people living near the river, who sometimes lost everything, flooding was a disaster. Yet for a water course, flooding is not a disaster, but rather is a part of the natural cycle and response to change.

Mostern described the Yellow River as “the most sediment laden river in the world,” and explained that erosion from the Loess Plateau on the watercourse leads to heavy silting, which eventually leads to flooding. People exacerbated this problem when they set out to build a series of fortifications and supporting settlements in the lower reaches of the Yellow River. “Human activity can have a very rapid and profound effect,” Mostern noted.

Mostern presented digital mapping of the Yellow River and its floodplain, which is part of her ongoing research into historical archives kept by bureaucrats in states along the Yellow River. She noted that the excellent record keeping of Chinese Imperial Officials makes it possible to study the Yellow River in this way.

A lively discussion followed on ecology, imperialism and how legends relating to water mastery persist today in China. The “legendary” Chinese figure of Yu the Great, who purportedly lived from 2200-2101 B.C., was famed for channeling all the rivers of China and establishing its first state in primordial times, supposedly devising a dredging system used on the Yellow River and other great watercourses in China. So important was Yu’s accomplishment that he was known in history as “Yu the Great Controls the Waters.”

Mostern responded to questions about highly visible research made public this summer in the New York Times indicating possible archeological evidence for the Chinese mythology of Yu and the first Dynasties.

For Mostern, interdisciplinary work in crucial to her project—her primary field is history but she also relies on the work of geographers, hydrologists and soil scientists.

We’d like to hear from other scholars and students who bridge the sciences and humanities: What has bridging fields meant to you in your own work? What have been the challenges and benefits?

Merced Seminar in the Humanities

Piracy and Protection

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by Rina Faletti

In 1924, Harvard Law Review editors wondered: “Is the crime of piracy obsolete?” Today, in a new century and a new millennium, when 90% of global commerce travels by sea, practices of piracy and counter-piracy are pertinent. Research on maritime piracy by Dr. Jatin Dua, socio-cultural anthropologist from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, traces ways in which piracy practices developed in the 19thcentury in the Western Indian Ocean region. He focuses on the Somali coast, one of the busiest merchant port regions in the world. Dua presented “Encounters at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Western Indian Ocean,” in a bi-weekly seminar series on water hosted by the Center for the Humanities.

Dua explores maritime piracy within frameworks of protection, risk and regulation as he moves among the apparently disparate worlds of coastal communities in northern Somalia, the global shipping industry, and maritime insurance adjustors in London. He locates ideas of protection on a broad continuum between what seem to be polar opposites: of danger and safety, piracy and protection, hospitality and hostility, trade and raid, intimacy and estrangement, patrimony and ownership. He proposes that these “opposites” are “stuck together” as the pirate, the counter-pirate, and the victim of piracy each lay a variable claim to the right to protect the slice of water through which each travels. Here, the “free and open sea” is “far from an empty space of circulation,” but rather a landscape of “forms of territoriality” that variably govern relationships of interchange and conflict at sea.

Dua focuses historical analysis on regional effects of imperialism and colonialism in the 19th century, when interests of imperial ideologies clashed with, and ultimately overran, local sovereignties in maritime transport and governance. His analysis of 19th century Protectorate ideology delineates native protection (whose claim is on an immediate and individualized prospect) from colonial political protection (which claims a global prospect). Dua points out that while colonial-style rhetoric expressed an aspiration toward peaceful and productive co-existence, this was accomplished through “civilizing” practices that disbanded native sovereignties, bringing them under institutionalized control and creating the dichotomy that defined the “Other.”

These points resonate in Dua’s discussion of his current ethnographic work on piracy in the Indian Ocean in recent years. In a discussion of abaan, a cultural institution of protection for itinerant traders in caravans on land, Dua finds that the on-land caravan concept extended culturally into sea trade. Traditionally, protectors of caravans were exalted in ancient poetry; similarly, the rise of piracy into the current century results in an industry of protection from piracy. Today in Somalia, piracy has developed into a highly capitalized practice, where a great deal of money goes into capture, kidnap, and ransom aboard large ships, and where everyone operates in modified modes of protection.

At base in this work, practices of protection hinge on limits of recognition in power relationships. Who is recognized as needing protection, and who as being able to provide it? Where do paradigms of protection fit into assumptions about “civilization”? And, how are the interests of both protector and protected insured in these relationships? Who has the right to be protected? Jatin Dua’s work demonstrates that questions of piracy and protection are far from obsolete.

Art, Environment, Global, Merced Seminar in the Humanities, Movement

Ways of Water

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by Kim De Wolff

If you google “Maya Khosla” you will find an Indian poet living in America, the co-director of the Turtle Diaries film project, and a Senior Field Biologist. And you will likely be impressed to learn that they are all one and the same person. In her seminar, “Ways of Water, Lives of Those Who Depend On It,” Maya Khosla demonstrated this accomplished breadth in a presentation of prose, poetry and film surrounding her work on sea turtles. Both project and approach reach across divides between researchers and publics, science and art. In what follows I pull out three themes that emerge in and from her work that help us grapple with questions about the practice of being interdisciplinary in a time of ecological crisis.

  1. Communicating “More Than” Science

Though trained as a biologist, Khosla explicitly leaves space for something “more than” science. She writes that arribada, “defies logic, and to some extent, defies scientific understanding,” and deploys scientific concepts as poetic metaphors. The ecotone, for example, as transition area between two bioregions, between land and sea; and as a kind of transcendent boundary space, something bigger and older than humans, than science. The project assumes a natural world that sometimes exceeds our capacities to understand it, and demonstrates a commitment to environmental communication that requires more than the conveyance of measured facts. This stands in contrast to approaches that privilege scientific understanding alone; it is a kind of resistance against the tendency to reduce problems in the word to matters of scientific accuracy (This is an interesting contrast to our first presenter of the seminar, Emmanuel Vincent, who emphasized accuracy and/as credibility as crucial components in climate change science communication).

Like all interdisciplinary endeavors, however, there are tensions between ways of making and sharing knowledge. In an interview, Khosla acknowledges this outright, pointing to the delicate balance between science and values and pushing toward a broader set of questions: what are the relationships between ways of knowing, caring, and acting? Does accuracy matter if it precludes action? Is awareness enough?

  1. Making Ourselves Present

Another way we can think about these tensions is by looking at the variations in writing styles between two short pieces. The Arribada article, for example, leans more toward the conventions of science or environmental writing. It presents a phenomenon in the world: the wonders of turtles coming to nest; a threat to this continuing as returning turtle numbers decline; and the researchers trying to understand it all. The author, as the researcher-writer is a mostly outside observer, describing what is happening on the beach. The article is written in past tense, and even draws on bits of passive voice.

Where the Arribada article opens with images of turtles and turtles alone, the fieldnotes article in Flyways begins with the writer herself very much present: she is “shin-deep” in ocean and turtles and darkness. It is unapologetically written in first person, opening with a declarative sentence that effectively says: “I am here.” Where the Arribada article gives a sense of how the beach looks, here we get a sense of how it feels: little claws digging into human skin and grains of sand that stick to everything; the excitement of scientists and the rubbery smell of baby turtles. The writing is far more emotional, and the author so very human: someone who hopes and cares and struggles and fails. This is perhaps best encapsulated by the devastating moment where a night of successfully leading baby turtles toward the sea by flashlight, ends in the daylight revelation of just how many more remain disoriented and exposed.

Faith. Doubt. Failure. All of these things, of course, are not standard fare in natural science writing where they would be seen to undermine the project of sharing objective knowledge. When and why do we write ourselves in and out of our work? What disciplinary or generic conventions and politics are enacted as we make ourselves and our experiences of research, of interpretation, of emotions, present or not?

  1. From Awareness to Global Change

My final big point returns to the question of the ‘how’ of rasing awareness. Sea turtles are an example of what biodiversity and science and technology scholars (among others) call Charismatic Megafauna: the kinds of species more likely to get attention from publics and policymakers than others. They tend to be large, cute mammals with big eyes. Think pandas, baby harp seals, polar bears. Anything that makes a good plush toy. Like their furry counterparts, a turned around baby turtle being torn apart by a crow – has the capacity to elicit urgent emotional responses in a way that the slow and dispersed effects of ocean acidification cannot. There’s no question, that these are effective strategies for raising awareness, and in the case of organizations like Greenpeace, significant funding. In theory, this funding is then used to protect whole ecosystems.

Yet, as poster-creatures for the ocean, charismatic species like turtles are more likely to be studied, protected and positioned prominently in environmental campaigns than say, the blobfish. Which, if you haven’t seen one, looks like a sad-faced melting pile of pink slime . In response, we could simply adopt the blobfish as our mascot, like the Ugly Animal Preservation Society (Yes, that is for real). But this kind of thinking still leads toward single species-specific problems and solutions. You can see this in the last question asked by the interviewer from Flyways: what can we do to save the turtles?

My final question, then, (and it is a big one) is how do we move from awareness to global change? From having more people on beaches with flashlights to turtle populations that do not need human intervention to thrive. And how do we move from saving specific turtles to addressing the much broader challenges – of climate change, of inequality, of capitalism – at the root of the threats themselves? I do not have the answers – but if it is turtles all the way down, then turtles are an excellent place to start.

Environment, Global, History, Merced Seminar in the Humanities

Following the Tracks of Yu

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by Danielle Bermudez

Water can often be seen as a source of life, but it can also lead to loss. In this seminar, Ruth Mostern, Associate Professor of History at UC Merced, explores how water may have led to immense change of landscape and life in eleventh century China. While research is still being conducted, Mostern provides fascinating insights about the soil of the Yellow River and how this impacted the defensive strategies of the Song dynasty. These dynamics may have altered the environmental history of the region, based on the timing and scale of loess plateau fortification, leading to numerous disaster floods during the eleventh century.

The Yellow River, or Huang He, is the third-longest river in Asia, and is the sixth-longest river in the world, with an estimated length of 5,464 km. It flows through nine provinces, and empties in Shandong province. During the eleventh century, military strategy was important, and ambitious fortification with garrisons, as well as the presence of more than half a million soldiers, had an immense impact on an ecologically fragile region.

According to Mostern, the natural landscape of the Yellow River is prone to soil erosion without vegetation cover. Fortifications in Northern Song were strategically built near the edges of the Yellow River. The exposed erosion-prone sand and soil made its way into the Yellow River, and ultimately drove disastrous flooding downstream. This resulted in one of the most rapidly rising sedimentation rates in history.

Flowing with our ongoing theme of “water,” seminar participants agreed that the environment is not a fixed place, it has agency, is dynamic, and ever-changing, but what is the scale of that change? As the seminar came to a close, participants lingered on the following central question: how do humans shape the natural environment, and conversely, and how does the environment continuously shape us?

Environment, Global, History, Merced Seminar in the Humanities

al-Karaji’s Hidden Waters

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by Danielle Bermudez

Al-Karaji’s treatise has inspired stories worldwide about famous “hidden waters”. The 1,000 year old ancient text has stirred a 2009 children’s book called Water Scientists, as well as a 1950s Persian story called Blind White Fish. The 1950s story even prompted a group of western academics to conduct an excursion in search of the rare fish species mentioned in al-Karaji’s treatise.

While there is an Orientalist fetishization of al-Karaji’s treatise, Abigail Owen, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in World History of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, contends that al-Karaji’s work should be celebrated as one of the oldest texts of its kind in the field of hydrology. Al-Karaji was a mathematician and engineer from the late 10th century-early 11th century. Of Persian origin, he spent an important part of his scientific life in Baghdad where he composed ground breaking mathematical books. In fact, most scholars regard him for the beginnings of freeing algebra from geometry.

One of his most recognized works is his technical treatise on the extraction of hidden waters, which contains complex and profound understandings of different kinds of natural water systems, proper care of tunnel construction and maintenance, methods of water level measurement, the description of instruments for surveying, the construction of conduits, their lining, protection against decay, their cleaning and maintenance, as well as a structure of ethics based on specific social and cultural notions of law, property, and ownership.

Owen and her research team attempt to translate al-Karaji’s 1,000 year old treatise into English, a challenging process of carefully decoding words, images, and meanings. Al-Karaji’s ancient treatise has been translated before, such as from Arabic to Persian, and from Arabic to French. Oftentimes, however, translations of the treatise have obscured particular meanings of fresh ground water, such as with the origins and use of the word “qanat.”

Owen’s research on al-Karaji’s treatise demonstrates how meanings of water are fluid and dynamic across space and time. She makes evident how al-Karaji’s treatise serves as an important form of representation of knowledge about the environment, through a complex understanding of water systems, encouraging us to take up ongoing questions regarding the urgent need and use of water in our society – past, present, and future.

Environment, Merced Seminar in the Humanities

Climate Feedback and Media Coverage

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by Danielle Bermudez

Only 23% of people living in the United States say that they have enough information to make up their minds about climate change[1]. How does media coverage affect our understandings about climate change? And, what if scientists could provide their own feedback on climate media coverage?

These are some of the questions that led Emmanuel Vincent, Project Scientist for the Center for Climate Communication at the UC Merced, to create the website climatefeedback.org. This online platform allows the scientific community to annotate and comment on climate media coverage, while giving the public access to this information.

Vincent’s talk was the first UC Merced Seminar in the Humanities of the academic year, launching the Center for the Humanities’ biennial research theme on “Water” for 2015-2017. In his presentation, Vincent reiterated that oftentimes climate media coverage can be confusing, and that the climate feedback website is intended to be a community resource both for scientists and the public alike. The process of the website includes (1) identifying a media piece on climate change, (2) matching scientists to evaluate the article, (3) having scientists annotate the article (includes highlighting, adding figures, charts, and images, commenting, etc.) and (4) assigning an overall rating on the media piece. Members of the public can then access these annotated articles on the climate feedback website and read the annotations and comments provided.

With contributing scientists from prominent research institutions all over the world (over 50+), the climate feedback website has led to media modifying their articles to reflect the comments provided by scientists. The website is intended to make an impact on journalists, concerned members of the public, and has garnered enthusiasm from scientific experts worldwide.

Ruth Mostern, Associate Professor of History at UC Merced, served as a respondent to Vincent’s talk, raising important questions of authority, power, and access. How do communities become permeable? Who can comment on these platforms? Whose voice becomes validated? Who is authorized to provide validation? And, what is the meaning of “expertise”?

Mostern discussed the creation of communities of practice, meaning, and discourse as exemplified through the climate feedback website and as a continuation of ancient practices of annotation and commentary on texts deemed worthy of attention. Mostern discussed both ancient and modern expressions of annotations and commentary, such as hypothes.is, open source and open code platforms, annotations on maps, and other social media websites. The climate feedback website has become a mechanism of community-building within and beyond the scientific community, as a form of public scholarship; as well as a form of publicly and socially engaged work, through the use of common domains and shared language and expertise.

[1] Leiserowitz et al (2011) Climate change in the American Mind. Yale Project on Climate Change Communication.

Geography, Global, History, Merced Seminar in the Humanities

The World Turned Upside Down: Changes in Representations of the World in Medieval Eurasian Maps: Seminar with Hyunhee Park

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by Chancellor Dorothy Leland

My role is to say something that helps open up conversations, and I need to confess two handicaps from the beginning.

First, I am not a historian and hence do not have the expertise to critically assess the analyses and arguments that Professor Park presented us with today.

My second handicap is that I am map impaired.

By map impaired, I mean that I often struggle to successfully use the conventions for understanding the maps that I encounter in my daily life. I most frequently experience this handicap with navigational road maps, which appear to me as a dizzying array of highways, streets, and intersections that fail to correspond to the world as I inhabit it. I am a country girl who learned to find my way using a set of physical landmarks—the old oak tree in front of the yellow house, Mr. Miller’s orchard, the dirt path that meandered between fenced pastures to the spot, sheltered by a stand of eucalyptus trees, where I boarded the school bus. To this day, I rarely pay attention to street names and instead look for navigational beacons in the landscape that surrounds me—churches, billboards, dwellings, tree clusters, and others icons that over time orient me in my environment.

Of course, I could draw navigational maps that more closely correspond to my own sense of place, and indeed I sometimes do so to supplement standard street directions for people who want to visit me. And as a child I liked to create maps that took me to fictional treasures or navigated me through imaginary worlds.

The point is that maps are human representations, symbolic depictions of place and relationships within place. Depending on the map, their features are informed by individual psychology, geographical knowledge, religion, politics, and many other factors. As such, maps provide fertile soil for insight from multiple disciplinary perspectives into the human symbolic imagination and the influences that shape it across cultures and historical periods.

The so-called upside down world maps provide a compelling locus of inquiry regarding map-making conventions and history.  These maps place the labeling on a map so that south is up, north is down, east is left, and west is right. As a consequence the Southern Hemisphere appears at the top of the map rather than at the bottom in contrast with mapping conventions that prevail in our own time and culture.   Indeed, it is only from within our own representational convention of orienting North to the top that maps with the South up appear upside-down.

As Professor Park noted in her presentation, the decision to orient maps according to a single prime direction varies across cultures, and there is no purely geographical reason why one direction supersedes others. In looking at the geographical understanding and techniques for mapping the world across different cultures and time, she finds the geographers “all drew observations from the Eastern rising and western setting sun to orient their maps along an east-west axis and north-south axis that followed the position of the North Star or the mid-day sun. Yet geographers of different societies presented this orientation in different ways according to the symbolic and sacred values held by their traditions.”

Although Professor Park reviews several hypotheses that may explain why, for example, the Islamic world adopted a south-up mapping convention, the focus of her study is not on this particular question but rather to trace the transfer of certain mapping practices and views from one society to another and to show how this influenced people’s geographic understanding.  I found her discussion of the influence of Islamic world maps in both China and Europe fascinating and a compelling example of how our understanding and symbolic representation of place, whether it be the world or something much smaller, can shift over time through contact and the selective blending of traditions.

Consider the case of China. Apparently, the earliest extant maps placed north on the top, consistent with Greco-Roman mapping and in contrast to Islamic world mapping. As Professor Park suggests, this may have been to indicate the primacy of a sacred direction based on a traditional Chinese idea that envisions the emperor as sitting in the north looking southward as if down on his subjects. This might also have been because the Chinese placed value on the North Star as a fixed star indicating the geographic pole used for voyages. These maps apparently also focused on drawing Chinese territory to the neglect of the larger world, and consistent with Chinese cosmology, which viewed the earth’s shape as a quadrangle under a spherical sky, maps were drawn within a rectangular frame. The impetus for change, according to Professor Park, was the political need for maps with a broader Eurasian perspective when China emerged as the center of the Mongol empire. Islamic maps and astronomical instruments became available as scholars migrated from Central Asia and Iran to China in the early thirteenth century, and this, combined with a strong political motivation, led to a new Chinese world map incorporating important Islamic influences.

But while there is a clear story to tell about the Islamic influence, Chinese map-making during this period apparently did not incorporate some important elements of the Islamic tradition—including, perhaps, the Islamic concept of the geographical round globe and the south on top orientation of Islamic maps. And the influence of these and other aspects of the Islamic tradition were not strong enough to stick over time and through changing political circumstances. When the Mongol empire failed and was replaced by the native dynasty, Chinese map-making for the most part continued in the earlier mapping tradition.

I have summarized this portion of Professor Park’s presentation because it holds broader questions that interest me—and perhaps you as well. Professor Park opened her presentation by noting that, “historians can often detect important political or cultural shifts caused by a change in perspective that allowed people to see things in a new way.” And although astute historians, armed with appropriate historical documents, can trace these shifts, it may be more difficult to understand the factors that determine or predict when a change of perspective is more likely than not to become firmly embedded as part of the dominant representational framework of a culture or society. In the case of China after the Mongol empire failed, what were the pulls back to the older, more traditional map-making conventions?

I suspect that the explanation does not belong to the province of history alone but rather requires, in addition, political, anthropological, sociological, and psychological modes of inquiry and explanation. Deep cultural change is notoriously slow and unstable in the absence of pervasive and practical, political, or religious influences to motivate the change.

My interest in this question is related to the ways that the study of the past from multiple disciplinary perspectives can inform our understanding of the present and possible future. I wonder, for example, what might be capable of dislodging the reification in the modern western world of the north-on-top map orientation. The question is speculative but also relates more broadly to questions about how traditions of representation get lost, how they might be recovered as part of our active framework for understanding the world, and how deep, lasting changes in the dominant representational frameworks of a culture or society manage to occur.

We know that any given map-making tradition represents only one of many possible ways of depicting place or world. With respect to world-maps, no curved surface like that of the Earth can be projected in two dimensions without some distortion, and different methods of projection are better for conveying elements such as shape or size, compass direction, etc. than others.   The political firestorm that emerged several decades ago over the methods of projection created in 1569 by Mercator, a Flemish mathematician and cartographer, rested on complaints that the distortion of territory that resulted from his method of projection (still widely used at the time) reinforced Eurocentric bias and western imperialism. Even earlier, several surrealists used representational hyperbole to expose the Mercator projection’s supposed Eurocentric bias by shrinking Europe and eliminating some of its countries. Of course, the Mercator map projection was created for navigational purposes by representing lines of constant compass bearing and not as a representation of the relative size or importance of world states, territories, and regions.   But it became over time, due to its widespread use for non-navigational purposes, the standard map projection for many westerners. Its distortion of large sections of the world might indeed have reinforced notions of Western superiority.

Contemporary upside down map enthusiasts point, similarly, to the way in which simply turning the North-up map upside down can jar us out of our complacent sense of place in a world that we have come to see through map-making conventions that dominate the modern western world. It has thus entered classrooms as an educational tool.

I cite these examples as an illustration of the fact that maps, like other forms of human representation, are rich with historical, cultural, anthropological, religious, political, and practical significance. Professor Park has helped us to see the chain of influence between several different cultures during a specific time period that resulted in significant changes in local geographic understanding and world map conventions.