E X P OS ITI O N Issue 2, Michaelmas 2009
HOLY SECRET
Jerusalem’s hidden quarter
OBESITY
Personal weakness or social disease?
GOTH RECAST
From subversion to kitsch Why we believe the
UNBELIEVABLE
EXPOSITION EDITORIAL EDITORS Emma Mockford Helena See FINANCE DIRECTOR Tom Rowley PHOTOGRAPHY DIRECTOR Jonny McQuitty GRAPHICS CONSULTANT Rich Hardiman SUB EDITORS Matthew Thomson-Ryder Tara Mulholland CONTRIBUTORS Zoe Enstone DPhil, Cultural Geography Rachel Crossland DPhil, English Literature Jonny McQuitty BA, Oriental Studies Melanie Wenger DPhil, Anthropology Linn Normand DPhil, International Relations Emily Burdett DPhil, Anthropology For advertising enquiries, please email: business@expositionmagazine.com For all other enquiries, please email: editor@expositionmagazine.com Sponsored by Royal Bank of Scotland and Shell
COVER IMAGE | Inside the Armenian quarter, Jerusalem, by Jonny McQuitty
Welcome to the second issue of Exposition. In this issue, we examine the power of storytelling, with an investigation of the psychological predisposition of the human mind to believe in the fantastical and counterintuitive, whether present in myths, fairy tales or religious ideas (Suspend Your Disbelief, page 28). The consequences and potential of such a predisposition towards storytelling are also dealt with; in particular the capacity of narrative to displace common misconceptions (Fat Society, page 22), and the lasting and formative effects of personal experience on the Israeli Armenian community, whose survival stories are recounted in our photo essay (Survivors’ City, page 14). Finally we consider the impact that works of fiction can have upon the development of other disciplines, in particular the sciences, and conversely the importance of broader, universal concerns to the storytellers of any particular age and culture (A Meeting of Minds, page 10). If you are interested in relating such narratives as well as reading them, there are currently opportunities to get involved with Exposition. We are now recruiting for editorial and marketing positions for Hilary 2010 – see overleaf for details. In the words of Thomas Brokaw: “It’s all storytelling you know. That’s what journalism is all about.” Emma Mockford and Helena See
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E X P OS ITI O N is recruiting
Editorial (Editors, Deputy Editors, Copy Editors, Design Editors and Sub Editors) business, and marketing positions for Hilary 2010 are now open for application. Those with design experience are particularly encouraged to apply. If interested, please come to an informal meeting at the OUSU buildings, Bonn Square, on Monday of 7th Week at 17.30, or email editor@expositionmagazine.com for more information. Contributions are always welcome: please email the Editor.
CONTENTS 6 GEOGRAPHY
Once associated with deviance and violence, goth culture has become the plaything of the Twilight generation.
10 14 22
LITERATURE Both driven by the Zeitgeist, Science and Literature belong to a shared culture. D.H. Lawrence and Einstein share the moment’s discourse.
PHOTO ESSAY Jerusalem is sanctuary to more than one people shaped by persecution and Diaspora. We capture life inside the Armenian quarter.
ANTHROPOLOGY Aside from being tactless, ‘stop eating’ is no longer the most logical response to obesity. We uncover its social and psychological causes.
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POLITICS
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ANTHROPOLOGY
The image of Satan seems crude and archaic in our modern secular world, yet it continues to entrench our most intractable global conflicts.
From God to Harry Potter, the human mind has evolved to believe the unbelievable, both for our survival and the progress of mankind.
PHOTOGRAPH | Taya Uddin MODEL | Elle von Munster
Freak Like CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY Once associated by the religious right with high school shootings and deviant sexuality, goth culture has given rise to mass vampire mania, and is now lining the shelves of Topshop “His music is made by cretinous goons singing sly, lewd, in plain fact, dirty lyrics. It manages to be the martial music of every delinquent on the face of the earth. It is the most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear.” uessing at the object of this quotation, one could be forgiven for thinking its target to be controversial rap and hip-hop artists like Jay-Z and Eminem, frequently criticised for inciting violence and glorifying drug use. Alternatively one might suppose it an attack on the wild stage antics of Marilyn Manson, or an extract from court proceedings against Judas Priest who, in 1990, were accused of hiding subliminal messages in their music. It could even be a reaction to The Beatles’ lyrics which allegedly inspired Charles Manson’s murders. In fact, this quotation comes from Frank Sinatra, commenting on the music of Elvis Presley. Popular outcry against ‘disturbing’ youth trends is often directed at those controversial musicians who have pushed the boundaries of taste and decency of their eras, inspiring others to follow their music, dress in a particular fashion, and even precipitate the formation of communities, or subcultures, amongst their followers and fans. History shows us countless examples of anxiety and moral panic triggered by such groupings: the Teddy Boy’s subversion of class boundaries in the 1950s; the provocative attitudes and behaviour of the mods and rockers of the 1960s; the anarchic messages of the punk movement in the 1970s; and currently the perceived anti-religious leanings of the metal scene, and outcries against ‘hoodies’ and knife crime within hip-hop. One particular musician who has consistently taunted the religious right and actively sought to shock and provoke is the ‘Antichrist Superstar’ himself, Marilyn Manson. This artist is commonly associated with a specific subculture, which has suffered from a fluctuating portrayal within mainstream populations: goth. Emerging out of punk in the late 1970s, goth (with a small ‘g’) developed a haunting and dark musical sound and aesthetic based on historical definitions and implications of the term ‘Gothic’ (capitalised). We can trace mainstream attitudes towards this subversive sub-culture as shifting reactions over time have resulted in changing labels: from freak, to victim, to trendsetter.
G
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Freaks? The description of goth as a ‘subversive’ subcultural grouping stems from its disruption of various societal norms. Most familiar is the goth aesthetic, which embraces feminine styles for both men and women. Goth men commonly wear skirts, corsets and makeup, have long hair and painted finger nails. Less obvious is the cultural infrastructure that accompanies the music and fashion: for many, goth is also a state of mind that brings together individuals united by a shared love of literature, art and philosophy, with an interest in the exploration of the darker side of life, including death, loneliness and destruction. Finally present is the incidence of alternative lifestyles; whether gay, bisexual or transgender, individuals may have been drawn to the scene as an accepting environment in which to openly live out their traditionally taboo identities. This embrace of taboo subjects led to a common assumption that goths are depressed, gloomy people with an obsession with death. Research published in the British Medical Journal in 2006 has reinforced this assumption, suggesting that young people who identify as goth have a higher rate of self-harm than non-goths. This research was internationally reported, with the media keen to capitalize on the scare factor. The Times’ headline, “Goth subculture shows its dark side through self-harm and suicide rate” was typical. Despite the questionable validity of the research methodology - the small sample size and the fact of merely implied causality (does being involved in goth make you self-harm, or are people who are more likely to self-harm drawn to goth for a supportive culture in which to deal with these issues?), the study provided juicy headlines and led to panicking parents. The research even resulted in calls for state regulation: The Moscow Times in 2008 reported government plans to ‘ban’ emo and goth due to their perceived glorification of self harm and suicide. Certain high-profile events have significantly furthered the media presentation of goths as dangerous to others, not merely to themselves. The Columbine High School shooting in Colorado in 1998 saw twelve people murdered by two students, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. These two young men were cast as “outsiders” and “loners”, who perpetrated their crimes wearing black leather trench coats. Police searches revealed Marilyn Manson CDs in their bedrooms and the media widely referred to the killers as >>
Me
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The Moscow Times in 2008 reported government plans to ‘ban’ emo and goth due to their perceived glorification of self harm and suicide
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>> goths, dubbing them the “trench coat mafia”. The association was made: Marilyn Manson plus goth signals danger. Ignored by the media was the fact that many goths would not consider Marilyn Manson’s music to be part of their scene, and the lack of evidence that either perpetrator self-identified as ‘goth’. In a memorable interview by Michael Moore in the film Bowling for Columbine, Manson later argued that he was being made a scapegoat for the failings of society. Indeed, a 2002 report by the US Secret Service revealed that only 27% of the perpetrators of 37 school shootings between 1974 and 2000 were “considered to be part of a ‘fringe’ group”, while the majority (41%) were “considered mainstream students”. In several cases, specific reference was made by the media to the perpetrators’ involvement in “dark” subcultures such as “goth”, whilst their black clothing and trench coats were repeatedly highlighted. No mention was made of the jeans and polo shirts worn by other killers, who are instead presented as troubled youths, victims of bullying and psychologically unbalanced. Sporting Levis doesn’t automatically make you a psychopath, but wearing a black trench coat just might. This mind-set has infiltrated policy, with certain US schools introducing dress codes including a ban on Manson t-shirts. It has even impacted language, with articles from the Associated Press and ABC News
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recording that the phrase “don’t make me go trench coat on you” has now entered US high school vocabulary. Victims? Whilst the demonisation of goth subculture has led to the negative associations described above, there are also examples of goths themselves as targets of discrimination and abuse. The website Alterophobia records cases of “fear, prejudice and hatred towards members of alternative subcultures”, and while conducting PhD research on goth cultures in the UK, USA and Japan, the present author found that almost all participants interviewed had experienced verbal and sometimes physical assault. One male participant from the USA had even been threatened at gunpoint. A particular incident that reached international news bulletins was the murder in 2007 of 20-year-old Sophie Lancaster, who was attacked while returning home from a goth club by a group of drunken youths, specifically because of the way she was dressed. The murderers were just 15, 16 and 17 years old. Two have received life sentences, while three others have been jailed for grievous bodily harm. In the wake of the tragedy, Sophie’s family has launched a campaign entitled ‘Stamp Out Prejudice, Hatred + Intolerance Everywhere’ (S.O.P.H.I.E) which ultimately aims
to bring about a change in the law. Petitions to 10 Downing Street have demanded a wider definition of hate crime to include “crimes committed against a person or persons, on the basis of their appearance or subcultural interests”. The event deeply shocked both the goth and the wider community. A charity single entitled ‘Never Take Us Down’ was released by metal band Beholden, whilst David Cameron made reference to Sophie’s murder soon after the event in a speech about youth crime, declaring “enough is enough”. Headlines contrasted starkly with previous media reporting of goth-related incidents: The Daily Mirror led with the headline “chilling, random, mindless brutality” when reporting the attack, whilst Richard Morrison for The Times asserted that “by all accounts Sophie was a caring girl who simply wanted to express her individuality by dressing the way she did – a quintessential goth, in other words”.
LEFT TO RIGHT | Dita von Teese, burlesque artist and ex-wife of Marilyn Manson; AndromedaX and Elle von Munster in a Tim Burton-inspired Corpse Bride shoot, both by Taya Uddin
Trendsetters? This positive shift towards a more sympathetic portrayal of goth has been reflected in fashion, art, television and film. Gothic fashion was literally ‘in Vogue’ in August 2008 as the autumn/winter 08/09 collections of many high fashion designers referenced the genre. Angular cuts and a predominantly black colour palate dominated at Balenciaga, and the layering of lace, satin, velvet, mesh and leather at Givenchy and Alexander McQueen demonstrated that, as British Vogue asserted, the key look of the season was ‘soft goth’. The trend is set to infiltrate the high street once again in 2009. Top Shop’s coming autumn collection is entitled ‘Horror Girl’, and features a kitsch haunted house print and bleeding poppies motif alongside spider web knit and leather detail. The Times has reported that “if ever there was a year to embrace your inner dark side,
2009 is it”, while The Guardian claims that “Gothdom is proving to be as enduring as a Chanel bouclé suit or a Burberry trench”. An article entitled ‘Five killer reasons to turn goth’ in Time Out New York included being part of a strong community, female empowerment and being given a wide berth on public transport. Goth characters have also appeared of late on Coronation Street and Hollyoaks, and the associated image of the vampire is currently a cult favourite. The new installment of the Twilight series, New Moon, has been causing hysteria amongst teenage girls everywhere, and 2010 will see a new season of the TV series True Blood. Renowned for his dark productions, Tim Burton is soon to be the subject of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. A mainstream subversion? According to some social theorists, subcultures such as punk are gradually absorbed by the mainstream via the process of commercialisation to such an extent that their initially subversive symbolism becomes neutralised and loses power and meaning. Does goth, with its presently favourable media atmosphere face the same end? Goth subculture would seem to be an oddity in this respect. It embraces capitalism and uses it for its own ends, with bands such as The Cure signed to major record
labels and enthusiasts buying clothing from high street stores and transforming them into club attire. It contributes to the ‘mainstream’ but still maintains a healthy underground scene: goth has its own clothing designers, models, photographers, musicians, record labels, authors, magazine publishers, promoters, and festivals. The scene even has a cruise that sails around the Caribbean each year, hosting some of the most popular goth bands. But goth does need new blood to continue its perpetual, albeit undulating modifications and adaptations. A critical mass is required in order to support its internal infrastructure and as many ‘first generation’ goths are now reaching their mid-forties, some inevitably have other commitments and cannot participate as vigorously in the club scene as they once did. Fresh ideas and perspectives are also needed to fuel the various sub-genres of goth music and style, essential to prevent the culture from becoming stagnant and irrelevant to future generations. In this respect, media exposure can only be a good thing. Zoe Enstone is a DPhil student in Cultural Geography. Having returned from fieldwork in Tokyo and New York, she is currently writing her thesis entitled ‘The Globalization of (Un) Popular Culture’
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A Meet
LITERATURE Bridging the chasm between science and the arts, the convergent thought of Albert Einstein and D. H. Lawrence on relativity and relativism points to the single culture that unites all disciplines
ting of Minds T
he gap, or perhaps more accurately, chasm perceived to lie between the sciences and humanities has long been deplored. Charles Snow, in 1959, spoke of the “gulf of mutual incomprehension” between these “two cultures”: “literary intellectuals at one pole – at the other scientists.” Whilst arguably too simplistic a dichotomy, Snow’s observations still retain a certain resonance. A recent article in The Times described the picking of A-level subjects as a choice “between two tribes”. Author, Antonia Senior, recalled her conscious decision in her late teens to “wear mostly black, smoke lots of roll-ups, read too much Nietzsche and confuse ‘existential angst’ with ‘bone idleness’.” She favoured “the easier stuff that Man made up” over “the stuff of life and the Universe.” And yet efforts to close the gap actually pre-date even Snow’s complaints. The now ever-growing combined field of literature and science took hold in the first half of the twentieth century. Take Marjorie Hope Nicolson’s text, Newton Demands the Muse: Newton’s ‘Opticks’ and the Eighteenth Century Poets published in 1946. Since then the field has both grown and changed. A significant shift has been in the fundamentals of the discipline’s approach. Whilst early studies relied on the primary significance of science, with literature “following gratefully along in its wake”, the former has in recent years been somewhat demoted; its privileged status as a perceived investigation of objective truth, and therefore hierarchically superior to social, linguistic and historical trends, no longer rings true. The latter half of the 1900s witnessed the study by literary critics of scientific works themselves as text. Influential is Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1983), in which Beer considers not simply the influence of Charles Darwin’s work on contemporary literary writers, but also the influence that these writers may have
had on him. Beer’s realisation and repeated exposition of the fact that science and literature “share the moment’s discourse” forms the basis of much of the best work in the area. Thus Beer explains, “Science always raises more questions than it can contain, and writers and readers may pursue these in directions that go past science. Such discussions in their turn may provide metaphors and narratives which inform scientific enquiry.” Beer’s “shared discourse” is a reference not simply to the language and metaphors employed by scientists and literary writers alike, but also to the common ideas, questions and problems that may concern them at any particular moment. Katherine Hayles has made similar observations, suggesting that “different disciplines are drawn to similar problems because the concerns underlying them are highly charged within a prevailing cultural context”. What we see then is the displacement of Snow’s “two cultures” with George Levine’s “one culture” from which both science and literature emerge, separate but linked. So how then are we to go about defining the discourse of a particular moment in time? Consider our own time: what are the key ideas, problems, questions, images and metaphors that together construct and limit the culture of the early twenty-first century? And how do literature and science interact with these questions and thereby each other? Adopting Levine’s one culture, we quickly come to see that within that single body, “scientific and literary discourses overlap, but unstably” (Beer). The nature of D. H. Lawrence’s relationship to science has been hotly contested since his death in 1930. Traditionally, Lawrence was viewed as “deeply and volubly antagonistic to the scientific reduction of life to mechanism”. Subsequently countered with the idea of an “ambivalent approach”, the predominant, contemporary suggestion is that Lawrence in fact combines “a negative valuation of science with an enthusiasm for the new physics and its philosophical consequences”. >>
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LEFT | Albert Einstein writing an equation for the density of the Milky Way, c. 1931; RIGHT | D. H. Lawrence, c. 1925
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>> student and a teacher of science at the time of embarking upon his literary career. He studied science in preparation for the King’s Scholarship Examination which he sat in December 1904, and also during his time at Nottingham University College between 1906 and 1908. Having qualified as a teacher, Lawrence taught at the Davidson Road School in Croydon from 1908 to 1912 and, according to the testimonial written for him by headmaster Philip Smith, he “to a great extent influenced the science teaching of the whole school”. Lawrence’s reaction to “the new physics” introduced by Einstein in the early twentieth century is most obvious in his Fantasia of the Unconscious, 1922. The second chapter of this work opens with Lawrence hailing Einstein directly: “We are all very pleased with Mr Einstein for knocking that eternal axis out of the universe. The universe isn’t a spinning wheel. It is a cloud of bees flying and veering round. Thank goodness for that, for we were getting drunk on the spinning wheel.” But of paramount interest to Lawrence are the implications of Einstein’s work for us as human individuals, as he makes clear later in Fantasia: “I am I, but also you are you, and we are in sad need of a theory of human relativity. We need it much more than the universe does. The stars know how to prowl round one another without much damage done. But you and I, dear reader, in the first conviction that you are me and that I am you, owing to the oneness of mankind, why, we are always falling foul of one another, and chewing each other’s fur.” By 1922, following the experimental confirmation of his general theory of relativity during the solar eclipse of 1919, Einstein was a household name, a contemporary celebrity. The outcome of the eclipse expeditions was widely reported and followed by a major boom in popular science writing. Lawrence himself wrote to his friend, Samuel Koteliansky, in June 1921, at about the same time as beginning work on Fantasia, with the following request: “Lend me, or send me, a simple book on Einstein’s Relativity.” Lawrence’s subsequent explorations of the theories of relativity within Fantasia, whilst demonstrating an understanding of Einstein’s basic assertions, are also indicative of the classical error of non-scientists in conflating relativity with relativism. So, when Lawrence provides a more thorough explanation of what he understands of the Einstein theory we find him claiming that “there
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is nothing absolute left in the Universe” and expressing his inclination to Relativity: “I think there is no one absolute principle in the universe. I think everything is relative”. Both statements misrepresent Einstein’s thesis, overlooking for instance the former’s designation of the speed of light as an absolute physical principle. Does this matter? Clearly it would were Lawrence attempting to write his own popularisation of Einstein’s theories of relativity, but that is not his intended undertaking in this text. Rather, he is using Einstein’s thesis as a means to explore his own ideas about human relationships; Lawrence is adapting Einstein’s language to develop what he saw as the human implications of Einstein’s new theories of relativity. That Einstein’s theories do not have any such personal human implication does not diminish the significance of Lawrence’s response; rather it reminds us that, as Beer has written elsewhere, “Ideas do not remain static when they change context: science and literature transform rather than simply transfer”. Of course, literature does not always make use of scientific ideas in such an obvious way, nor do literary writers always include them as consciously as Lawrence in Fantasia, but science is always there as a part of the culture from which literature is constructed, just as literature is also present as science emerges. The two both form part of a larger whole, overlapping and interacting, and in order to fully study their interactions we must acknowledge their differences as well as their similarities. Levine has described the two disciplines as like two different roads: “to get to the heart of the culture one can travel the road of science, the road of literature, or – better – both.” Einstein concluded the preface to his popular exposition of relativity with the hope that it would “bring someone a few happy hours of suggestive thought”. As Beer has recognized, science and literature are only two of many disciplines, despite Snow’s original dichotomy. In order to fully comprehend Levine’s one culture and embrace Einstein’s suggestive thought we must re-immerse ourselves “in the multiplicity of forces” constitutive of social life. Rachel Crossland is a DPhil candidate in English Literature at St John’s. Her thesis is entitled ‘Sharing the moment’s discourse: Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence and Albert Einstein’
PHOTOGRAPH | Seminarians, training towards priesthood in the Apostolic Orthodox Armenian Church take part in a midday service in St. James’ Cathedral, situated in the Armenian Quarter of the Old City, Jerusalem
SURVIVORS’ CITY PHOTO ESSAY Set apart by high walls and an autonomous culture, the Old City of Jerusalem’s fourth quarter is the resting place for another, less well-known Diaspora In the south-western corner of Jerusalem’s old city lives a community whose ancestry stretches back over a millennium. Home to approximately two thousand people, the modest entrance and thick stone walls near the Jaffa Gate mark the boundaries of the city’s Armenian Quarter. The Quarter is something of a religious centre: it serves as the seat of the Armenian Patriarchate and St. James’ Cathedral, both part of the Apostolic Orthodox Armenian Church. The community provides a focal point for the Armenian diaspora within Israel, accommodating about half of the four thousand Armenians who live in Israel and the Occupied Territories. Of those who live in the Quarter now, some come from families who have lived in Jerusalem for many generations; others are more recently arrived, many in the wake of the Armenian genocide in the early twentieth century which triggered mass migration to the outskirts of the Ottoman empire. Today the community is somewhat segmented: those involved in the Patriarchate and its seminary are naturally responsible for the conservation of the community’s spiritual and religious life; the remainder continue a less contemplative day-to-day existence, some maintaining the traditional crafts of the community, particularly the ceramics trade. The seminary provides the Armenian Orthodox Church with many of its priests. Boys are selected for training at a young age and begin a regimented lifestyle in relative isolation from their families. Prior to the collapse of Communism, candidates were typically drawn from Armenian diaspora communities, particularly in the Middle East, since the authori-
tarian government in Armenia prevented students leaving to attend the seminary in Jerusalem. Recent years however have seen a new interest in Armenian identity, and the country has become a reinvigorated source of applicants. Father Koryoun was one of the first of this new wave. After joining the Seminary in 1995, he was ordained and attended the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In common with many other ordained priests, he began to work as a teacher in the Seminary, teaching the history of the Armenian Orthodox Church. However Father Koryoun has continued to study educational policy at the University and is actively involved in developing modernised approaches to teaching in the community: “We need to educate people in universal values, with much more tolerance, and in a spirit of pluralism.” The seminarians share responsibility for guarding religious sites under Armenian control, such as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. These sites are often places of friction between other Christian denominations, the significance of which is not just religious but nationalistic. Tensions over the Church of the Holy Sepulchre are such that a local Muslim family keep the keys to the doors to prevent any sect barring others. For the majority of the community however, such tensions are merely distant concerns. The community is their home, a village within a city, that separates them from the chaos of Jerusalem. The school, library, and community centres are the focal points, all linked by cobbled alleyways, and generations of the same families live in adjoining houses. >>
>> In one of these houses lives Mary, the second eldest resident in the Quarter. A survivor of the Armenian genocide (which took place between 1915 and 1918), she was found abandoned as an infant in the ruins of a village called Gurun in Turkey. She was later moved to a Danish Orphanage in Lebanon, and eventually came to Jerusalem, after attempts to search out surviving family members revealed that all had been killed. The memory of the genocide looms large in the collective consciousness of the community. Scattered around the walls are freshly pasted flyers detailing the events of the genocide, and many of the families that live in the Quarter are descendants of survivors who fled Turkey and Armenia to find safety in Palestine. The library in the Quarter contains a substantial archive which represents an attempt to preserve the history of Armenian villages and towns that ceased to >>
ABOVE | Children play during a break from school; the Quarter is like a village within a city, self-sufficient and self-contained. RIGHT | A picture taken in 1910 showing the outside of the walled Armenian Quarter. The gated entrance of the Community is to the left of the photograph.
PHOTOGRAPH | The seminary in the Armenian Quarter is responsible for the ordination of many of the priests in the Apostolic Orthodox Armenian Church. The process of ordination takes up to eight years, and those priests, such as the one pictured above, who choose to remain in Jerusalem, do so in celibacy.
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>> exist. Countless shelves carry books detailing the history of communities destroyed, of their leading figures, and bound volumes of local Armenian papers. Stories of survival are commonplace; Kevork Kahvedjian, the photographer from whose collection the older images of the Armenian Quarter featured in this article are taken, still relates with emotion the story of how his father was the sole survivor in his family after he was rescued from a mass execution site near Marden in Kurdistan. The foundations of the ceramics industry for which the Armenian community is famous throughout Israel were established under Ottoman rule, when fewer than a dozen Armenian potters from Kutahya in Turkey were imported through the aegis of the “Pro-Jerusalem Society� to repair and replace the exterior tiling on the Dome of the Rock. Ultimately they never carried out the work, but some of the original workers remained and continued to produce Armenian ceramics. Today both descendants of the original workers and others who have taken up the practice continue to produce hand painted ceramics in workshops in the Old City.
FAR LEFT | Trainee ordinands assemble outside the Cathedral of St James before a midday service. ABOVE | Two seminarians walk across one of the many open spaces that are found within the Armenian Quarter, which is home to over 2,000 individuals of many different ages. LEFT | Mary, a survivor of the Armenian genocide, is one of the oldest members of the community. Abandoned as a child in the wake of the destruction of her town, before being placed in an orphanage in Lebanon, she is now a matriarch of a family that extends over four generations.
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TOP | Stepan Karakashian is the son of one of the original potters brought by the Ottoman authorities to make repairs to the Dome of the Rock in 1919. Since 1922, the family has continually produced traditional ceramic despite the wars of 1948 and 1967 that led to upheaval in the Old City of Jerusalem. ABOVE | The Sandrouni workshop in the Armenian quarter has been in operation for over 25 years; here a pattern is inscribed on the piece prior to it being coloured, glazed and fired. LEFT | An Armenian ceramist in 1920 decorates a vase; the Armenian community is renowned throughout Israel for its ceramics. Many Israeli homes have the name or number of the house inscribed on a tile in Armenian style.
Historic images reproduced with the kind
Jonny McQuitty is an undergraduate student at Worcester College reading Oriental Studies. He recently spent time working for Ha’aretz Daily Newspaper in Tel Aviv, Israel
MEDICAL ANTRHOPOLOGY Long believed to be a question of will power, psychological research is only now unpicking the social symbolism of food
T
he ‘obesity epidemic’ confronting the Western world is a phenomenon well reported and extensively researched. Media concentration upon the incidence of obesity in both the US and the UK has been startling, with reports focusing on the scaremongering statistics and data available. We are constantly told that escalation is inevitable, prevention nigh on impossible, and cost astronomic. But what of those individuals whose eating habits are referenced by this phrase? Widely heralded as suffering from a dearth of self control, will power or education, little effort has to date been made to identify with, or understand the experiences of those who would self-identify as ‘abnormal’ food consumers. The pre-war observation of all round philosopher, critic, and essayist Walter Benjamin seems pertinent: “experience is falling in value”. ‘Seeking Community in an Industrializing World: Ethnographies of Eating Management Programs in the United States and United Kingdom’ is an ongoing doctoral research project, examining the self-described eating experiences of members of Weight Watchers (WW) and Overeaters Anonymous (OA) in London and New York City respectively, who have struggled to achieve ‘normal’ patterns of food consumption. Discussion and research previously undertaken in this field has identified the importance of family eating patterns as a factor in-
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fluencing individual consumption habits. But how does this childhood interplay affect people at different times during their lives? Here, one member of OA describes her family’s eating patterns:
W
ell, I will say that I do believe I grew up in a family of compulsive overeaters, and I learned from pros. I mean, no one identifies as such: it’s just normal. It’s like, “you’re done eating when you got to pull your zipper down and pull your shirt out.” And so, that was just normal. I would sit in church on Sundays and just think about biscuits and gravy and the huge spread that would be at Grandma’s afterward. And then, you know, we’d go… And we’d eat. And I thought that everybody did that… And then the difference for me is though my family struggles with weight, I had a level of obsession that I don’t think anyone in my family really identifies with (or necessarily has)...
This narrative is typical of members of both WW and OA: family eating habits are identified as ‘abnormal’ when compared to the external social surroundings experienced over a lifetime. Often, it is the perception of what is deemed to be normal or abnormal within that wider social context that eventually prompts the individual’s questioning of their experiences of eating during and after
childhood. Take this member of WW, as she explains how familial norms of food consumption defined her eating experience and her perception of self worth well into adulthood:
I
am the original emotional eater. Happy, sad, lonely, any feeling was a great excuse for a jumbo cheeseburger and a slice of cheesecake. Hey, you copy what made you comfortable in childhood: whenever something was wrong or right, my southern grandmother would hand me a cookie. Two years ago, I was 150 pounds, and at 5’2”, I felt short, fat and basically invisible.
Striking in both narratives is the identification of difference: both members compare themselves to others around them, and it is the subsequent feeling of being different that ultimately defines the eating experience over a lifetime. Inherent to each program and each member is the need to make sense of the role that food has played at various times throughout life. Together, members unravel the social dynamics that may have contributed to the secondary meanings of how or why food was consumed. One member of OA describes the importance that food and eating played within her cultural background before coming to the meetings:
I
became a little adult right away. And I got a lot of praise for that, a lot of recognition. But, you know, the expectation of me performing, and pleasing others, and pleasing my parents, and doing things for other people all the time… the bar
got raised too high… Now I understand and I get why I used the food. I had to. I actually thank God that the food was there and that’s how I medicated my reality, you know? The food was so comforting: it was my friend. And, the thing is, you know I looked very skinny and I had an extremely high metabolism, and it was thought of as a good thing when I ate a lot of food. I was a volume eater and I would get a lot of praise from my parents and my culture, and they would all applaud and say “oh, you’re so good you’re eating! Good for you!” It was all about figuring out how you wanted me to be, so that I would get your approval and your love and your acceptance in order for me to be to be OK inside. In the meanwhile I was devaluing who I was and I had no idea who I was. So the food just took that away, and it took a lot of the pain that was going on in my home. Of interest here is the fact that for this member food consumption only became an identifiable problem within the external social context after the results of the consumption had started to show externally and aesthetically, through weight gain. This is a common strand often missed in the research of eating behaviors: so often the social, familial, or biomedical stigma of being overweight becomes the unhealthy component that defines the reality of the eating behavior. So, when body weight starts to increase, oft recommended solutions by medical practitioners are exercise or weight loss programs. This emphasis on the socially dictated norms which take body size as an indicator of overall health, can actually exacerbate the >>
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>> behaviours originally identified as problematic. A member of OA describes:
I
had been a gymnast as a little girl and a dancer for my whole childhood, and naturally was very lean, very athletic, and I got a lot of attention, praise, blah blah blah — something for my physical shape or fitness or whatever. I believe the addiction for me started there. For whatever reason that is very clear to me. I don’t know why, but I definitely can have no relief from the food obsession as long as the body obsession is there for me, cause that really feels like my primary addiction. Somewhere around 13, 14, 15 years old when my body started to change, naturally, my first feeling was ‘slam on the breaks’. A ‘normie’ little girl would be exited about or pleased about developing, getting curvy or whatever — this was all really bad news to me and highly unacceptable. And so I think that was the beginning of the end for me. I think that is when I first started to have that feeling of lack of acceptance about what I looked like and is when I started picking up the food. It’s when I started to diet — my first diet I was probably about 14 or 15, and I never saw the end of that. In those teen years I began the process of trying to take the weight off and I essentially put it on. And there was some yo-yoing along the way, but I never really figured out any magic formula to find the perfect diet and be relieved of the obsession.
Much of the danger that underlies the current approach to eating behavior within the biomedical system stems from this idea that the answer to over-eating is as simple as a change in the ways that people consume (or exercise). As many of the narratives exemplify in this project, such an approach cannot address the whole of the problem. This leads us to question another common assumption: the preconceived notion that knowledge and education are the most important components in addressing eating behaviors. Rather, the suggestion from these narratives is that there is a considerable population, represented by those in eating management programs in the US and the UK, who could benefit greatly from community based groups geared specifically towards addressing the variety of factors that result in unwanted patterns of food consumption. In a narrative from WW, one member describes how her background as a dietician alone was not enough to sustain changes in her eating behavior. What ultimately worked for her was a social environment offering sustainable support, allowing her both to lose weight and maintain her weight loss:
T
he hardest thing I’ve ever done, other than losing weight, was walking into a Weight Watchers meeting. You see, I am a registered dietitian. I spend my days telling people how to eat right to achieve optimal health. Going to a meeting and
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ILLUSTRATIONS | Rebecca Crompton
having to admit that I had a problem was embarrassing to me. At the end of my rope and feeling like a failure both personally and professionally, I went to visit my doctor. When I asked her to sign a consent form for a different weight-loss program, thankfully, she refused. Having been overweight my whole adult life and feeling that my last hope was slipping away, I started to cry. She looked at me and said, “Teresa, you are a smart woman who knows how to eat right, and I have faith that you will figure out a solution to this problem.” When I showed up at home with eyes blackened by mascara from crying, my husband looked at me and said, “Why don’t you go to Weight Watchers?” He pointed out that losing weight had never been my problem, but keeping it off was. He had seen my dramatic weight losses and gains over the years and encouraged me to finally go to a place where people would be speaking in the ‘same language’ as me. He felt that at Weight Watchers I would find an open dialogue about healthy eating habits and the support to maintain them. WW and OA are completely unique in their approaches to eating behavior and the ways that each define and address such behaviors, but the experiences of the populations found within both are strikingly similar, as are the healing benefits from community support that both offer to their members. OA frames eating behaviors through an addictions approach to food consumption. Members include those who struggle with
issues of under eating, purging or over eating. There are no set eating plans, and the community serves as the primary source of support while members differ in the ways that they ‘recover’ from their individual experiences with food. Conversely, WW is a program specifically geared at loosing weight, and gives specific diet regimes in order to do so. While the WW program does not accept members who have a recent history of eating disorders, nonetheless many members describe their relationship with food similarly to those in OA. As one member from WW explains:
I
knew I had to change my lifestyle when I realized I had become a foodaholic. I hid food around my house, and if I had something in my mouth when my husband walked into the room, I’d pretend I wasn’t eating. I would also reward myself with food for doing mundane things. After a load of laundry, for example, I would give myself a treat. I tried to blame the weight gain on medication that I was taking, but that was not true. Some medicines can cause you to gain a few pounds, but not to become morbidly obese. I don’t know why I was a foodaholic. I have close to the perfect life, with a husband who adores me and two wonderful grown children. But whatever the reason, I was overweight for 15 years and headed toward a heart attack.
Most members of OA describe their relationship to food in the similar language of addiction:
T
he food was doing something for me that nothing else did, which was calm my anxiety, and basically, my discomfort. So that’s when my eating career took off. I am, I guess, a garden-variety compulsive overeater. I have never been anorexic and I have never been bulimic (not for lack of trying) but it never worked for me (and I’m grateful for that). Um, and I have never been a really good dieter either, so my story was that I became very sneaky around food and I ate, and I just needed to eat all the time. I needed to just be consuming all the time. And so, the weight went on and I got attention for that – it was negative attention, but I got attention for it – and so it reinforced this idea that I came up with (and I don’t know where this came from) but that I was not enough the way that I was.
What both OA and WW offer to members despite their strikingly different approaches as organizations, is a community that allows its participants to discuss such issues with others who have also experienced feelings of difference when it comes to their relationship with food consumption. Rather than concentrating efforts on increased individual will power and self-control, the group serves as the primary resource in order to change behavior, thus releasing the individual from the constant pressure to accomplish this alone. Such community based organizations are unusual in the West.
Our industrialized societies have become increasingly focused on the notion of self-control, particularly in this context, in relation to health behaviors. Will power, knowledge and choice are the buzz words which epitomize mainstream attitudes towards those who over-eat. For members of WW and OA however, such embedded attitudes are recognized as unwelcome and unhelpful. Instead, within these organizations there is a collective strength that emerges as members are bound together through their common feelings of powerlessness over their food consumption and the unmanageability this has cause in their lives. That is the foundation of recovery. The suggestion that emanates so strongly from these narratives is that continuing to place responsibility upon each individual to consume in a manner deemed ‘healthy’ will actually prevent effective health intervention on an individual level. The legitimacy of the current approach to the obesity epidemic becomes questionable, and we might even speculate that this approach has actually become a contributing factor to the larger social problem in itself. In order to fully address what researchers, health practitioners, and the popular media commonly refer to as the ‘disease of modern civilization’, it is increasingly important to challenge the notion that more willpower or control are all that is needed in order to change health related behaviors. Melanie Stewart Wenger is a student of Medical Anthropology at Wolfson College, and is currently working toward her DPhil
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1170 WE SECULAR FANATICS POLITICS The image of the devil has mutated from a Medieval religious phenomenon into a secular, politicised weapon. At the heart of our ostensibly modern, international world, there persists an ancient agent of fear
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The historical phenomenon that is demonisation grew out of religious belief, before evolving into an inter-religious weapon of social exclusion, persecution, and blood-shed. The secular politicisation of the demonic in the modern era has led to a so-called ‘politics of demonisation’ suggestive of both the instrumental and creative purposes of ‘demonising the other’ today: instrumental to the extent that it may help serve distinct political ends and creative in that it can help generate an exaggerated, if not false, perception of threat. The meaning behind the demonic charge is hidden in the word itself. The word-decryption g(o)od - (d)evil clearly demonstrates the theological ancestry of the categorical imperatives of morality. ‘Good’ is by definition what God intends and ‘evil’ is the work of the Devil. A scholar on the concept of evil, Lance Morrow, has revealed how the term often “emanates, implicitly, from a devilish intelligence with horns and a tail”. Equating one’s adversary
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as demonic, then, is to accuse him of diabolical evil. The historical origins of demonisation are as such obvious. The earliest examples are faithful to biblical narrative, only depicting the famous demonic encounters described in religious texts. They were seldom – if ever – used to characterize a religious or political adversary. As illustrated religious texts became more widely distributed, however, the demonic figures of the monastic world – with their horns, tails, bulging eyes, cloven hoofs, deformed and hairy bodies – took hold of the public imagination, and demonic illustrations became increasingly faithless to the religious narratives. Medieval folklore adopted the myth of demon possession and by the end of the fifteenth century the idea of demonic servants in human form was pervasive. An entire vocabulary evolved during the late Middle Ages and the early modern period: adjectives included demoniac (possessed by demon), demonial (of or relat-
1634 ing to a demon), demoniast (one who was dealing with the devil), and demonist (a believer in or worshipper of demons). The witchhunts which took place between 1575 and 1700 stand testament to the growing public conviction in demonic possession. The demonic myth had other social implications: it gave rise to the systematic persecution of pagans, infidels and minority religious groups. Heresy was considered a Devil-inspired deviation. The demonic also came to represent a way of life: if alcohol was the devil’s drink, gambling was the devil’s game. Inter-religious rivalry between Catholics and Protestants denominations during the Reformation gave rise to some of the most evocative demonisation campaigns in Europe. Protestant pamphlets frequently included caricatures of the Pope as demonic; Rome was depicted as the degenerate, apocalyptic city of Babylon, and the Whore of Babylon, astride the seven-headed Beast of Revelation recast as the symbol of the Roman Catholic Church. The formal clevage of religious and political affairs in 1648 meant that the battle of the Churches in Europe would gradually cease to drive conflict as much as it had done in the past. Interestingly, this secularisation of political power did not ultimately suffocate the demonic mythology, and the ‘(d)evil enemy’ image persisted. The 20th century in particular saw a new era of demonisation. Government-run atrocity propaganda campaigns were common
2003 during the two World Wars. Both the Kaiser and Adolf Hitler, for instance, were frequently portrayed as either embodying or conspiring with Satan. The German government also exploited the demonic image in turn: Hitler dismissed the Jew as ‘the Satanman’ segregating this ‘human devil’ from the ‘human divinity’ of the Aryan race. Demonic accusations were also rife during the Cold War between the ‘dark forces’ of capitalism and communism. Contemporary examples of demonisation are perhaps a hybrid of satire and seriousness. On 20 September 2006, the Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez, announced the smell of sulphur in the United Nations General Assembly. Having taken the podium the day after George W. Bush, Chavez exclaimed: “The Devil, the Devil himself, is right in the house”. Demonic charges against the USA are not new: after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the Iranian Ayatollah, Ruhollah Khomeini, similarly branded the superpower ‘the Great Satan’, along with his ‘little Satan’ companion, Israel. Their demonic accusations are neither meant to encourage laughter, nor expected to be taken literally. They are a figurative charge of diabolical evil. There are many other modern conflicts that could be cited for using the demonic charge against their counterparts: the Balkan crisis or the genocide campaigns in Rwanda and Sudan to take just two examples. In particular, demonisation has contributed significantly to the intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the continued >>
IMAGES| From left to right: The Temptation of Christ, The Hunterian Psalter, Glasgow University Library, Special Collections; The Whore of Bablyon Astride the Beast of Revelation, The Bible in Pictures; Liberty, Kamyar Adl
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IMAGE | Where next, mein Führer? Cartoon by David Low, copyright Evening Standard / British Cartoon Archive
Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez, announced the smell of Sulphur in the UN General Assembly. Taking the podium after Bush, Chavez exclaimed: “The Devil, the Devil himself, is right in the house”
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>> violence and bloodshed of which stems largely from the perpetuation of hostile belief systems. Extensive studies have been done on the institutionalised nature of the mutual delegitimisation and negative stereotyping of Palestinians and Israelis. Societal prejudices are deeply embedded and prevalent in schoolbooks, with the result that, from a young age Palestinian and Israeli children are aware of their ‘evil’ other. In the Israeli case, Daniel Bar-Tal and Neta Oren note how Arabs in general are portrayed as “primitive, dirty, stupid, easily agitated and violent”. They are perceived in the Israeli literature as “killers, a bloodthirsty mob, rioters, treacherous, untrustworthy, cowards, cruel and wicked” with the ultimate aim of annihilating the State of Israel and driving the Jewish population into the sea. The Palestinian side and neighbouring governments sympathetic to the Palestinian cause have matched these demonising characteristics. Jordanian and Egyptian textbooks represent the Jewish with equal hatred; a ninth grade ‘Islamic Education’ book proves this point quite clearly, noting: “One must beware of the Jews, for they are treacherous and disloyal”. Speaking at the Fourth Conference on the Study of Islam, a Muslim theologian described the Jewish population as “enemies of God, enemies of humanity, dogs of humanity… Jews manifest in themselves the historical continuity of evil qualities… envy, hatred and cruelty are inherent in them… their wicked nature never changes.” The conflict’s intractable nature stems partly from both parties’ unwillingness to identify their part in it, and their overwrought blaming of the other side for its continuation. Israel’s “no partner” approach, as Yoram Meital calls it, was particularly
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prevalent during the governance of the right-wing Likud Party, although Meital notes that “by the summer 2000, both rightwing and left-wing media portrayed Arafat as an enemy, and Israel as the victim of his evil design”. Arafat was personally blamed for having prevented a successful negotiation settlement at Camp David in 2000, although scholars have pointed out in retrospect that part of the problem in the negotiation process was also the Israeli government’s reluctance to regard the Palestinian Authority as a legitimate peace-broker in the first place. Thus despite the mutual recognition of the PLO (the Palestine Liberation Organisation) and the Israeli government in 1993, negotiation deadlock continues. Observing the years since the Oslo Accords of 1993, one cannot fail to notice the contradiction between the official recognition of the ‘other’ and the constant de-legitimation and demonisation of that other as an honest peace partner. The recurrence of this diabolic thread through human history begs the question: what is the agenda behind the ‘(d)evil enemy’ charge? The diabolic enemy image is not created in a vacuum, and – more often than not – it is a consequence of real, violent and acute antagonisms. Arguably a victim of demonisation may well be a demon. At times, however, a demoniser may have an underlying agenda for consciously exaggerating or creating a devil enemy. The devil enemy image is one that is frightfully familiar to most and yet it remains largely under-theorised. Better conceptualisation of the disparity between the enemy and his devil image may appear a uniquely academic exercise, but such knowledge is needed in order to ‘exorcise’ international conflict and to remove the wall of ignorance that has barricaded our ability to understand the enemy – both in theory and in practice. Linn Normand is a DPhil candidate in International Relations at Nuffield College and a Stipendiary Lecturer at Pembroke College.
ANTRHOPOLOGY The attraction of the human mind to counterintuitive agents is the common thread linking our capacity to comprehend Harry Potter, the BFG, and the birth of Venus, with our capacity to believe in God Sandro Boticelli’s The Birth of Venus, housed at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence
Suspend your disbelief A
utumn 2008 saw familiar and outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins make headlines once again, this time not for any attack upon religion, but rather for his denunciation of the nation’s most popular wizarding student, Harry Potter. Dawkins warned against the possible dangers of children reading and believing such “anti-scientific” stories and myths, speaking of their “insidious affect on rationality”. And yet one cannot deny the obvious popularity of such fantasy tales. J. K. Rowling’s novels have broken record after record since 1997. The same goes for Alice in Wonderland, the BFG and Lord of the Rings. What is it about these stories that so captivates the imagination and appeals to the broadest audience? The answer to such a question might once have been considered the preoccupation of the literary critic. But now, Anthropology and Psychology are the latest disciplines to consider the appeal of fantastical worlds and religious ideas to the human mind, and its conclusions are far from “anti-scientific”. Characters from these films and stories captivate our mind because they are counterintuitive; they go against our natural expectations of what animals and persons would be like in the real world. They are manifest in other parts of human culture as well – similar counterintuitive agents pop up throughout our
calendar: Father Christmas, witches at Halloween, and the Easter bunny. We find them also in the spiritual realm: God, angels, demons, spirits, and so on. What is it about such counterintuitive agents that can explain their prominence in our cultural and religious life? Pascal Boyer has defined a counterintuitive agent as a human, animal, or even non-existent entity with properties that contradict our natural expectations of how such agents live or work in the natural world. Thus one would expect a dog to eat, sleep, beget other dogs, and one day die. A dog that can walk through walls has violated physicality expectations and a dog that can talk has a mentality expectation transferred to it. These violations and transfers are certainly interesting and unusual. But, what makes counterintuitive agents so comprehensible and appealing is not just that their special properties are interesting, but more importantly, that the agent’s remaining common properties also make the concept easy to understand. In order to more fully understand this we need also to understand some fundamentals of the architecture of the human mind that make us so disposed to think of counterintuitive agents. The first building blocks of the human mental toolkit >> are cognitive structures which provide us with the basic
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>> tools to understand the natural and social world. The first five years of a child’s life will normally see the development of intuitive knowledge domains: intuitions about physics, biology, and psychology. Mere months after birth, infants are able to understand basic principles of physics: that, for instance, objects should remain cohesive (rather than randomly breaking apart), and that objects cannot be self-propelled. In the biological domain, preschool age children understand basic biological events: that a dog will give birth to dogs (and not gorillas), and needs to eat food and to sleep. And by the age of five, children generally demonstrate a significant grasp of the psychological domain, understanding that other people have thoughts, desires, and memories. The second aspect of our mental toolkit are basic ontological intuitions we have of persons, animals, objects, plants, and artefacts (man-made objects). When one thinks of a person, we also generate accompanying expectations that set out what a person can and cannot do. Intuitively we know that a person cannot walk through walls or fly, but that a person should have all three intuitive domains: psychology (can think of other people), biology (can grow, eat, sleep, die), and physicality (conform to a basic set of physical laws). These two intuitive faculties form the basic framework that explains why counterintuitive agents are both compelling and make sense to us. Counterintuitive ideas can only make sense when they comply with our intuitive understanding. For example, a man that flies (Superman) is firstly compelling because
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the counterintuitive property of being able to fly violates our natural expectation that persons cannot fly, thus demanding our attention; but is secondly, comprehensible since we largely understand what a person concept is (and as such we intuitively know that Superman can eat, sleep, grow). Agents also drive plot developments, initiating and receiving action. As such a completely intuitive and rational story may not be as memorable or as compelling as a story with counterintuitive agents. But there is a limit to how counterintuitive a concept can be. Only minimally counterintuitive ideas, or ideas that have only one or two counterintuitive properties, seem to stick in our brains. In fact recent research has shown that the majority of counterintuitive objects in myths and folktales have only one or two counterintuitive properties. And what of God? Why has belief in God or gods persisted so successfully beyond any other counterintuitive concept? In the first instance, Gods are easy to understand, tapping into our intuitive person concept. Our minds can easily think of a person who is immortal and knows everything. Secondly, there is tendency to look for agency even when there are no agents around. Studies have shown that we have difficulty thinking of deceased relatives as no longer existing – rather we continue to think that Aunt Sue can still be sad, pleased, and remember that you were her favourite niece. Gods are not far off from deceased spirits; people can easily attribute a mind, emotion, and desires to gods as well. So what of Dawkins’ contentions that to think of such ideas is
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT | The BFG, Sophie and Clown and Beauty and the Beast, both copyright Quentin Blake; Ratty and Mole, E H Shepard; Alice sitting between Gryphon and Mock Turtle, John Tenniel; I saw a Heffalump today Piglet, E H Shepard
a dangerous phenomenon, liable to undermine our faculties of rationality? This predisposition to think of fantastical and religious ideas that our atheist critic so lambastes need not in fact be “anti-scientific”. Evolutionary psychologists have examined how our minds have evolved in such a way as to ensure that we are able to conceive of other minds or cognitive beings, distinct from ourselves. This so-called Theory of Mind (ToM) allows people to understand events and happenings crucial to basic functioning and survival: to empathize with other human beings and to understand ideas of intention and desire. This ability, combined with the other intuitive faculties described above, allows for universal, crosscultural understanding of the counterintuitive, including the religious ideas Dawkins is so critical of. Without it, we would be at an evolutionary disadvantage; lacking any conception of other minds or beings distinct from ourselves, we would be unable to co-exist and interact with others. We also employ counterintuitive agents to help us explain ambiguous events or phenomena: we seek out agency when something occurs, largely due to our evolutionary desire to protect ourselves from other agents, from potential predators. Thus we wish for an explanation of the bump we hear in the night, or the creaking door.
Counterintuitve agents then, although unusual, do not pose any danger to rationality itself; natural selections rather suggests that such ideas are adaptive. The possibilities that counterintuitive agents pioneer, drive creativity. Although these fantastical and counterintuive ideas abound particularly in the creative arts, the same creative and counterintuitive thoughts can precipitate scientific thought. What if, for instance, the earth is not actually as flat as it intuitively appears? To ignore what Dawkins calls antiscientific thought may be a detriment to the advancement of science itself. The propensity to think about counterintuitive ideas is essential not only for culture and the arts to continue but also for scientists to forge new and exciting ideas for the future. By suggesting that our fascination with and conception of counterintuitive agents is flawed rationality, we ignore part of the intuitive (and rational) structure of our minds. If Dawkins could replace the fantastical characters depicted here with others of the “real world”, both human creativity, and the scientific progress he so idealises, would certainly suffer. Emily Reed Burdett is a member of Exeter College and is reading for a DPhil titled, ‘Further Exploration of Children’s Conceptualizations of God Concepts’
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