Antiquitopia

A recent article in the Chronicle (via Anthony LeDonne ) has raised this question and answered very strongly in the affirmative.  It is one thing to say a method or approach is ineffective or not useful, and quite another to say that it is actually dangerous. I remember hearing Jan Assman speak at Union Theological Seminary when I was a graduate student at Columbia.  I honestly don't remember a word he said, but just remember him speaking in stereotypical professorial tweed. The article is quite long, but the beginning does point out some of the important breakthroughs of Mnemohistory developed by Aleida and Jan Assman in the past few decades.  Such as... In his recent volume,  Cultural Memory and Early Civilization :  Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination  (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Assmann recapitulates a number of his most important findings. Building on the work of previous theorists of cultural memory as an approach to histor...

There come times when similar stories from different places emerge at the same time. Perhaps this phenomenon is real or perhaps it is in the eye of a particularly sensitized beholder--I am currently writing a piece that includes a segment on circumcision and divine visions and reading a collection of essays on circumcision. That seems to be the case with circumcision at the moment. While there are often occasional debates on circumcision's medical merits, as a religious rite, as mutilation, etc., it seems that such a debate has heightened in the past week. Firstly with the potential legal issues in San Francisco and now, as many newspapers have reported (not usually on their front page) that Russell Crowe has joined the fray on twitter, calling it "stupid," "moronic," and comparing it to human sacrifice. While the San Francisco ban, for the most part, is directed toward all circumcision without qualifying for Muslim, Jewish, or medical practices, Crowe ...