Table Of ContentRICHARD E. MILLER
KURT SPELLMEYER
THE NEW HUMANITIES READER
THIRD EDITION
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Visit The New Humanities Reader Web site @ www.newhum.com
RICHARD E. MILLER
KURT SPELLMEYER
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T H E
New Humanities
READER
Third Edition
Richard E. Miller
RUTGERS UNIVERSITY
Kurt Spellmeyer
RUTGERS UNIVERSITY
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT PUBLISHING COMPANY Boston New York
Acknowledgments
This project has been a long time in the making. It has been helped along by the hard work and dedi
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sion for the new humanities. Now, all that remains to do is what always remains: to think connec-
tively, to read creatively, and to write one's way to new ways of seeing.
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2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9-EB-12 11 10 09 08
CONTENTS
Thematic Contents ix
Preface xiii
DAVID ABRAM, The Ecology of Magic: A Personal Introduction
to the Inquiry 1
When an anthropologist visits Bali and rediscovers the life of the senses,
his transformation brings the natural world alive in new and amazing
ways.
LEILA AHMED, On Becoming an Arab 25
An Egyptian scholar describes her evolving sense of what it means to be an
Arab within the context of the transformation of Egypt from a British
colony into a sovereign Arab nation.
ANDREW J. BACEVICH, The Real World War IV 47
History textbooks identify two world wars, but the Cold War, which pitted
the United States against the Soviet Union, could also be considered a
world war, as can the current global war against terror. Bacevich traces
World War IV back to President Jimmy Carter and foresees a future defined
by perpetual wars fought to advance a notion of American freedom with
out limits.
JONATHAN BOYARÍN, Waiting for a Jew: Marginal Redemption
at the Eighth Street Shul 72
A first-person account of the author's disenchantment with the Jewish tra
dition of his childhood, followed by his personal reinvention of it after an
odyssey through a postmodern world of multiple perspectives and beliefs.
BRYAN CAPLAN, "Market Fundamentalism" Versus the Religion
of Democracy 95
What are the differences between a religious fundamentalist, someone who
believes that democracy is fundamentally superior to any other form of
government, and someone who believes that the drive for profit is funda
mentally good for society? Caplan's surprising answer here highlights the
corrective value of the markets and of the economists who study them.
AMY CHUA, A World on the Edge 123
As democracy and free markets spread across the globe, we are supposed
to see an improvement in the quality of life, but many parts of Africa,
iv CONTENTS
South America, and Asia have witnessed an explosion of violence and eth
nic hatred. Chua asks us to consider the possibility that too much freedom
all at once can tear societies apart.
DEVRA DAVIS, Presumed Innocent 141
We think of science as the realm in which objective truth can be deter
mined, but what do we do when the search takes decades and human lives
hang in the balance? A case in point is studying the environmental causes
of cancer, where the effort to secure conclusive evidence is hampered not
only by the complexity of the problem but also by the vested interests of
industries manufacturing everything from pharmaceuticals to cell phones
to artificial sweeteners.
ANNIE DILLARD, The Wreck of Time: Taking Our Century's Measure 167
An essayist and poet contemplates the insignificance of human lives in a
universe so huge that it overwhelms our best efforts to understand it.
SUSAN FALUDI, The Naked Citadel 177
A reporter describes the legal battle—and the cultural meltdown—that
ensues when The Citadel, an all-male military academy, admits its first
female recruit.
DANIEL GILBERT, Immune to Reality 213
Despite the tens of thousands of hours we spend pursuing the American
Dream, recent research in psychology demonstrates that we often prove
surprisingly inept when we try to predict what will make us happy. Is ful
fillment just an accident?
MALCOLM GLADWELL, The Power of Context: Bernie Goetz
and the Rise and Fall of New York City Crime 233
Why is it that in matters of human behavior, change is so hard to predict?
According to Malcolm Gladwell, a journalist and social critic, we seldom
see the real causes of social change because we pay too much attention to
the big picture. Instead, we need to start with the little things.
WILLIAM GREIDER, Work Rules 251
Millions of Americans dream of the day when they can become their own
bosses, but most of them will spend their working lives in chronic insecu
rity. Rejecting socialism as well as corporate capitalism, Greider makes his
case for a third way: worker ownership of business.
HENRY JENKINS, Why Heather Can Write: Media Literacy
and the Harry Potter Wars 272
Young people are immersed in technology, texting friends, chatting online,
wandering virtual realities, and surfing the Web. Does this immersion
Contents v
work against literacy, or does it redefine what it means to be literate in the
twenty-first century?
STEVEN JOHNSON, The Myth of the Ant Queen 307
Do complex systems like ant colonies and megacities have a collective in
telligence greater than the intelligence of their individual members? If the
answer is "Yes," then can we ever know where our systems are taking us?
CHRISTINE KENNEALLY, YOU Have Gestures 326
Where does language begin? Do animals have access to language? What is
the significance of the fact that humans point but apes don't? Kenneally
teases apart the differences between human gestures and gestures in the
animal kingdom to show how language is present and active long before a
human child begins to speak.
JON KRAKAUER, Selections from Into the Wild 343
Searching for the fundamentals of life, a young man named Christopher
McCandless sets off into Alaska's backcountry. There he dies, apparently
of starvation. Was he a fool, or does his journey bear witness to courage,
curiosity, and other admirable traits?
BETH LOFFREDA, Selections from Losing Matt Shepard: Life and Politics
in the Aftermath of Anti-Gay Murder 367
In Laramie, Wyoming, the gruesome murder of a gay college student puts
the town under the media microscope. From one perspective, we see citi
zens struggling to spin their public image. From another perspective, we
might be able to detect the first signs of genuine cultural change.
TANYA M. LUHRMANN, Metakinesis: How God Becomes Intimate
in Contemporary U.S. Christianity 392
How does God become real to people? Luhrmann, an anthropologist, de
termines that metakinetic states—hallucinations, trances, hearing voices—
give rise to the experience of a viscerally intimate God, a personal God
who speaks to true believers. The rise in such believers in the United States
might be the result of a lonelier citizenry, made all the lonelier by the
spread of trance-inducing technology.
AZAR NAFISI, Selections from Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir
in Books 416
Can art be more powerful than a dictatorship? An account of a women's
reading group in the days following the establishment of the Islamic
Republic of Iran.
TIM O'BRIEN, HOW to Tell a True War Story 439
When applied to the reality of war, words like honor, valor, courage, and
sacrifice may be profoundly dishonest. O'Brien's short story asks its readers
vi CONTENTS
to take another look at a subject that no one can claim to understand fully,
not even those who have found themselves in the thick of battle.
VIRGINIA POSTREL, Surface and Substance 453
Has conventional thinking misled us about the "shallowness" of style and
fashion? Postrel asks us to reconsider style as nonverbal communication—
a message as well as a medium. It turns out that the superficial may run
deeper than we imagined.
PIETRA RIVOLI, Dogs Snarling Together: How Politics Came
to Rule the Global Apparel Trade 477
Where have American blue-collar jobs gone? The standard explanation is
that these jobs have been driven overseas and to Latin America, where
cheap labor is to be found in great abundance. Rivoli follows a T-shirt from
the rack at Wal-Mart back to the factory and finds that the story of the de
cline of the American textile industry is much more complicated and has
many more players than the standard explanation would have us believe.
OLIVER SACKS, The Mind's Eye: What the Blind See 505
For more than a century people have believed that the structure of the
brain was fixed at birth and more or less unchangeable thereafter. But the
writings of people who have lost their sight suggest that the brain can
rewire itself to a degree that scientists have only started to recognize.
CHARLES SIEBERT, An Elephant Crackup? 525
The phenomenon known as Human-Elephant Conflict—as measured by
events where elephants destroy villages and crops, attacking and killing
humans—is on the rise. Elephants, who travel in herds and mourn their
dead, are profoundly social creatures. The collapse of elephant culture,
brought on by predation, stress, and trauma, may point to what lies ahead
for human culture.
PETER SINGER AND JIM MASON, Meat and Milk Factories 543
Most of the meat, poultry, pork, milk, and eggs that Americans eat comes
from massive factory farms where animals live sedentary, medicated lives
before being slaughtered. The environmental consequences of this ap
proach are known, but Singer and Mason underscore the ethical conse
quences of turning a blind eye to the suffering of animals.
REBECCA SOLNIT, The Solitary Stroller and the City 571
How we move through the world influences how we know the world: seen
from above, the city is a grid; seen from the back seat of a limousine, the
city is a stage for flaunting one's success; seen through the eyes of the soli
tary walker, the city becomes a richly textured tapestry, where the citizens
enjoy a communal solitude. Solnit invites her readers to see the benefits of
an urban stroll, as opposed to a walk through the country.
Contents vii
SANDRA STEINGRABER, War 597
Steingraber, diagnosed with a type of cancer known to be caused by expo
sure to environmental carcinogens, returns to her childhood home to ex
plore the local industrial landscape. A scientist by training, Steingraber
traces the use of DDT in World War II and its subsequent use by the agri
cultural industry, mapping these developments on to the geography of the
countryside that surrounds her home.
GREGORY STOCK, The Enhanced and the Unenhanced 630
Now that genetic technology has moved off the pages of science fiction
novels and into research labs, who will control it? The government? The
medical community? Religious conservatives? Stock argues for a genetic
free market in which parents have the right to enhance their progeny in
any way they want—and can afford.
MARTHA STOUT, When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning, It Was Friday 654
The term divided consciousness refers to those times when we withdraw
mentally from the world around us. Daydreams and other forms of subjec
tive escape often help us to keep our mental balance by shutting out events
when they threaten to be overwhelming. But when does our power to shut
things out begin to close the door on sanity itself?
DEBORAH TANNEN, The Roots of Debate in Education
and the Hope of Dialogue 676
Anyone who watches the presidential debates or listens to talk radio can
see that Americans love to argue. But the truth is that the winner in any de
bate may prove to be mistaken, while the loser may fail to communicate in
formation that everyone could benefit from hearing. According to linguist
Deborah Tannen, there has to be a better way.
EDWARD TENNER, Another Look Back, and a Look Ahead 708
Technological innovations happen in response to problems, but each inno
vation ends up producing a series of new problems in turn—which require
new innovations, which produce new problems once again, apparently ad
infinitum. Is all of this change self-defeating? While admitting that technol
ogy has "revenge effects," Edward Tenner makes the case that progress is
no illusion.
ROBERT THURMAN, Wisdom 737
Losing one's sense of self or having an empty self is typically imagined to
be a fate worse than death. But Robert Thurman, an expert on the Bud
dhism of Tibet, argues that we have misjudged the experience of "no self,"
which is not a dark corridor to oblivion, but the road to what he calls
"infinite life."
viii CONTENTS
JEAN TWENGE, An Army of One: Me 755
What it means to have a self has changed over the course of the past thirty
years. While Baby Boomers set out to change the world, Generation Me
seeks out fun as the highest value and promotes self-esteem as the greatest
good. Drawing on data taken from 1.3 million young people, Twenge
argues that this obsessive focus on the self is not just bad for society, it's
also bad for the individual.
Credits 783
Author and Title Index 787
