Monkey
Business I
A
controversy is brewing over the popular 1996 book Demonic Males, by Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham
and science writer Dale Peterson, which argues that male violence is a legacy
of our primate past--not a race- or class-based social problem. Some of
Wrangham's colleagues have complained that the book's cover is implicitly
racist. Depicting four stages in primate evolution, the cover portrays drawings
of a orangutan, a chimpanzee, a gorilla, and a generic-looking human male--who
according to the image's archival history turns out to be African. Berkeley
anthropologist Jonathan Marks, in the May issue of the Anthropology
Newsletter , calls Wrangham's juxtaposition of apes with a black man
"callous and thoughtless science" that trades on historically racist
associations. Wrangham says he worried about the juxtaposition but went ahead
with the cover after showing it around. He also says he asked Houghton Mifflin
to alter the image for the book's newly released paperback version, but the
publisher told him it would be too difficult.
Encounter
Group
A new
publishing house called Encounter Books will begin issuing right-of-center
books, filling the void left by the Free Press, reports the Chronicle of
Higher Education . (The Free Press used to publish mainly conservative
volumes such as Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell
Curve and Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education but has distanced
itself from a solely right-wing orientation.) Seed money for the new press
comes from the Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Encounter's editor in chief,
Peter Collier, cites Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae and Jim Sleeper's
Liberal
Racism--both critical of conservative as well as liberal orthodoxy--as the
kind of books he'd like to print. He plans to release the first titles in two
years.
Monkey
Business II
Renowned
orangutan specialist and Louis B. Leakey disciple Biruté Galdikas is under
attack for allegedly neglecting--and even mistreating--the endangered
orangutans in her care. For months, the Internet mailing list Primate-Talk has been flooded with debate over whether Galdikas
has allowed her orangutans to grow too dependent on their human caretakers and
whether she's exposed the animals to human diseases. The publication last month
of an unflattering book about Galdikas called The Follow , by Canadian
novelist Linda Spalding, has fueled the controversy. What's more,
the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry--with whom Galdikas has clashed over
logging policies--has accused the anthropologist of housing "a very large
number of illegal orangutans ... in very poor conditions" at her residence. The
government is intimating it may bring her up on formal charges.
Eating
for Credit
New
York University has inaugurated a Ph.D. program in food studies, and
Routledge now has an in-house editor devoted to acquiring food studies
manuscripts. In October, St. Martin's Press will publish an anthology of essays
from the Times Higher Education Supplement titled Consuming Passions:
Food in the Age of Anxiety . The book's co-editor Jennifer Wallace, a
lecturer at Cambridge University, suggests that food is a source of reassurance
in troubling times. "Food is the irreducible factor of daily life," she
observes, "... which seems to remain impervious to the sources of anxiety, to
politics and ideology, to mental or spiritual hopelessness." Other essays
include: "Edible Ecriture," by British Marxist Terry Eagleton, which argues
that Samuel Beckett's anorexic prose may betray "a race memory of the Irish
famine"; and "Savouring the Antique," by classicist Emily Gower, which warns
against romanticizing the Roman bacchanalia, since "most ordinary people
experienced famine and lived at subsistence level."
Divided
by a Common Language
Jared
Diamond, a Pulitzer Prize-winning physiology professor at the University of
California Los Angeles, has offered an answer to what he calls "one of the most
disputed questions of linguistics": the origins of the Japanese language.
Despite their many similarities, Koreans and Japanese have long been mutually
hostile and have pointed to the vast differences between their languages as
proof that they lack a shared ancestry. But biology and the archaeological
record suggest otherwise, Diamond argues in the current issue of Discover. Modern Japanese, he contends, derives from an archaic
form of Korean that took root in Japan but was stamped out in Korea during the
first several centuries. "Like Arabs and Jews," Diamond warns, "Koreans and
Japanese are joined by blood yet locked in traditional enmity. ... The
political future of East Asia depends in large part on their success in
rediscovering those ancient bonds between them."
Vienna
Noise Choir
After a
long and contentious residence at the University of Southern California, the
Arnold Schönberg
Center has decamped to Vienna, the city of the 12 tone composer's birth.
Unhappy with USC's attempt to include conventional classical music in the
institute's music courses and concerts, Schönberg's descendants successfully
sued USC for "neglecting its contract" with the institute. The university had
to underwrite the costs of moving the institute's archives and library to a
lavish new space at the Palais Fanto in Vienna, where its budget will be
tripled in size. The new institute opened its doors in March.
Fair
Harvard
The
Boston Globe has published a hard-hitting four part series on Harvard University. The series emphasizes that
Harvard's prestige has never been greater: Its endowment is vast and its
faculty unparalleled. But, the Globe notes, Harvard has accepted
donations from foreign dictators, routinely denied tenure to brilliant young
faculty, and refused to spend more than a sliver of its almost $13 billion
endowment on increased financial aid. One highlight: The Kennedy School of
Government is offering more and more minicourses and Harvard certificates to
luster-seeking world leaders. Over the past six years, the school has trained
"virtually all senior Russian military officers," taking them to visit the
"average" American suburb of Wakefield, Mass., as part of their education.
