Common Knowledge

Graff, G.;

2015 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2872307

Taking a series of period courses arranged in chronological order seems the natural and obvious way for students to learn history. But an odd thing happens when these courses are not connected to one another, as they rarely are in the college curriculum. Since students experience each course as a self-contained unit, they have no incentive to remember one period once they move on to the next. Describing a course he taught in a required literary history sequence, the author is struck not only by his students' inability to make connections with the previous course in the sequence but also by their evident surprise at being asked to recall what they had studied in any previous course. This essay—a guest column in Common Knowledge —goes on to generalize the implications of the incident, arguing that, paradoxically, the effect of period courses is to erase the sense of historical sequence, continuity, and contrast from students' minds and thereby to erase history itself. The point is not that there is something wrong with dividing history into period courses—some such division is unavoidable and necessary—but that unless period courses are connected, students will come away with an ahistorical view of history. periods history continuity contrast curriculum

Innerarity, D.;

2015 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2872319

In a so-called knowledge society, whenever we have to choose, decide, anticipate, or entrust a task, the range of options available tends to be so large that we cannot be satisfied that no relevant possibilities have been overlooked. Both individuals and societies as a whole are compelled to manage this explosion of opportunities in its myriad forms, which is why the astute management of the excess of options occupies the majority of their time. Our most important act is the organization of uncertainty. Given the lack of proportion between our limited knowledge and the problems we need to confront, what we celebrate as a “knowledge society” is also a society of ignorance. This essay, published as a guest column, concludes that, in the coming years, the principal controversies we will face will involve questions about what we know, about what we do not know, and about the incompleteness of the knowledge on which we must base collective decisions. knowledge society ignorance information data

DiBattista, M.;Beyer, J.;Girke, F.;Malegam, J. Y.;Hall, E.;Rival, L.;Platt, K. M. F.;

2015 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2872331

“Only connect …,” the epigraph of Forster's Howards End , offers itself as a model of moral diplomacy. The efficacy of genuine human connection—whether it takes the form of creative action or of decent human relations—in containing and civilizing force is an idea that informs the novel's conception of what constitutes and ensures civilized life. Forster regarded propriety and convention as expressions of force and so applauded any assault on conventional feeling as an act of moral heroism. This essay introduces the third installment of the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means”: it explores and indeed extols the moral efficacy of connection in containing force and resolving conflicts, but it also contemplates the obstacles to connection, which Forster dramatizes with his characteristic honesty. Only connect diplomacy force novel love

Beyer, J.;Girke, F.;

2015 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2872343

Twenty-five years ago, drawing on her fieldwork among the Zapotec, the legal anthropologist Laura Nader proposed the term harmony ideology to characterize postcolonial systems of justice. She found outward social harmony to be the result of coercion, as people were denied access to legal means and were forced either into alternative dispute resolution or into autocoercion, in which marginalized people presented unity to outsiders to avoid state interference. This proposition constitutes a relevant advance in relation to previous approaches to conflict and harmony in the social sciences, but it falls short by failing to account for indigenous notions of and demands for harmony. Ethnographic data from rural Kyrgyzstan and the South Omo region of Ethiopia indicate that there are models of harmony active at various social levels and that harmony is a genuine concern of communities. Demands for harmony are performatively integrated into social practices. The authors argue that, rather than searching for a scale of sociality where harmony might be “organic,” it is necessary to critically assess proclamations of and demands for harmony as means of coercion even within small communities. A focus on social practice in such places reveals that the experience of community partly derives from acts of collectively condemning and sanctioning deviance. harmony community coercion practice state

Malegam, J. Y.;

2015 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2872355

Oppositional constructions of peace and war and simplistic equations of peace with justice obscure the importance of activities primarily geared toward the limitation of harm. The medieval and patristic legacy of thinking with peace restricts peace to variants of a singular concept that dictates the diplomatic and domestic policy of modern states. At the same time, secular political theory has moved away from medieval clerical acknowledgment of compatibilities between turbulence and peace, producing temporally bounded categories of peace and war that facilitate damage or at best allow harm to endure. In this discourse, social disruption must act as signifier for more general (structural and systemic) violence—but then is repressed on exactly the same terms, making it difficult to arrive at solutions for conflict on the ground without renouncing calls for justice and equity in the long term. peace maintenance harm patristic medieval

Hall, E.;

2015 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2872367

The earliest ancient Greek text to narrate the resolution of a large-scale conflict by judicial means is Aeschylus's tragedy Eumenides , first performed in Athens in 458 BC. After explaining the historical context in which the play was performed—a context of acute civic discord and the imminent danger of an escalation of reciprocal revenge killings by the lower-class faction in Athens—this article offers a new reading of the play and asks if it can help us think about the challenges inherent in conflict resolution today. The prosecutors are the Erinyes (Furies), the archaic supernatural agents of murder victims; their responsibility, in predemocratic Greece, before the invention of law courts, was to punish murderers. The defendant is Orestes, who has killed his mother but argues that, since she had killed his father, he was acting justly. The judges consist of eleven Athenian citizen jurors plus the presiding god, Athena, whose twelfth vote carries slightly more weight than any of the others. The article concludes that some aspects of the procedure are exemplary, especially Athena's insistence on respecting each side's right to be heard, her sensitivity toward the grievances felt by the defeated Erinyes, and the compensation they are offered. On the other hand, the tragedy clearly shows how difficult it is for a fair legal judgment to be made without a view to larger issues of national expedience, security, and inherent power structures, especially that of patriarchy. Eumenides revenge law justice athens aeschylus conflict resolution

Rival, L.;

2015 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2872379

Twenty “uncontacted” Taromenani were slaughtered and two female children kidnapped in retaliation for the spearing of a couple of “civilized” Huaorani in March 2013. After months of indecision, the government of Ecuador decided to abduct the two little captives and send six warriors to jail for genocide. Each of these actions caused a moral outrage locally, nationally, and internationally. This article explores the complex constructions through which these violent events have come to be understood, both by the Huaorani and by Ecuadorian nationals, and it shows how two broad concerns—“territoriality” and “compensation”—have structured both the violent conflicts discussed and subsequent attempts at peace restoration. The essay concludes with a brief anthropological discussion of the relationship between ontology and politics. Whereas recent theorizations of Amazonian cosmic economies of alterity sharpen our understanding of “the assimilation of the Other as a mode of reproduction,” they tend to obscure the whys and the hows of intra- and intercultural disagreements, as well as the nature of the resort to violence as a way of asserting one's will. Huaorani Taromenani Amazonian warfare territorial conflicts conflict resolution voluntary isolation human rights

Platt, K. M. F.;

2015 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2872391

Latvia presents a unique and counterintuitive case in the history of postsocialist ethnic relations. Despite the USSR's having annexed Latvia by fiat and armed force in the 1940s—and despite the population transfers of so many Russians and other Soviet peoples to the region that Latvians themselves nearly became an ethnic minority in “their own” republic—there has been no ethnic violence between Latvians and Russians in the postsocialist era. Yet the events of summer 2014 have radically shifted the political imaginary of this region, raising the specter of a loss of social cohesion and an eruption of violence. The essay examines one of the factors that has supported amity in Latvia for the past two decades: late-Soviet cosmopolitanism and its legacies in present-day Latvian cultural life. Analysis focuses on public art projects in Riga during the summer of 2014, in the shadow of the war in Ukraine. Latvia near abroad cosmopolitanism postsocialism violence

Emerson, C.;

2015 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2872438

Conterno, M.;

2015 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2872546