Disasters and social change

Under the guidance of our Department Head, Bob Anemone, the Department of Anthropology at UNCG initiated a brown bag lecture series entitled "How I spent my 'summer vacation'," with summer vacation in quotations because we (the anthropology faculty) are active researchers who conduct much of our field work and data collection during the summer months.

On April 1, our colleague Art Murphy presented on his work in Mexico on human responses to disasters. For the last few years, he has been working on the ABC Day Care Center Fire, a tragic event that eventually resulted in the death of 49 children. He is currently on a Fulbright in Mexico and, while there, he was asked to work on a more recent disaster, the chemical spill at the Buena Vista del Cobre mine. There is a lot going on in both cases, not the least of which is politics, but there is one point that Art made that resonated with me. It is often assumed that disasters−take Hurricane Katrina or the Haiti Earthquake−highlight social inequalities and are thus movers of social change. While the former is true, Art pointed out that the latter is typically not: as things calm down, people try to recreate and preserve the system of inequality that existed before the disaster. 

19th century German science as seen through literature

Another post from my lengthening backlog...

The Lloyd International Honors College at UNCG hosts an event they call "Food for Thought," which brings UNCG scholars to speak about lively topics. I had never attended, but I saw the title for the February 11 talk, "Visions, Dreams, and Divinations: Literature and Science around 1800," and was intrigued by the fact that a visiting German scholar, Susanne Gomoluch, was speaking. Apart from my interest in the history of science, I've spent quite a bit of time in Germany, so, my interest piqued, I went.

She began by providing some historical background, and the political situation in Germany during the late 18th and early 19th century is particularly critical. At the time, what is now Germany was a loose confederation of autonomous states and principalities that was, until 1806 when it was dissolved by Napoleon, the Holy Roman Empire. This was followed by several loosely affiliated German confederations until the eventual unification of Germany under a single government in 1871.

Holy Roman Empire in 1789. By Robert Alfers via Wikipedia.

The looseness of the political arrangement is important in this context because there simply was no unified policy towards anything. Germany lagged behind Great Britain and France in industrialization, for example, largely because of this lack of centralized decision-making. This also meant, though, that a diversity of perspectives on science emerged in the German states. Dr. Gomoluch spoke about a number of interesting issues, but the most fascinating was a character named Karl Phillip Moritz (1756-1793). Moritz, among other things, was a high school teacher, professor of archaeology and, most pertinent here, the editor of Das Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde als ein Lesebuch für Gelehrte und Ungelehrte (The Magazine of Experiential Psychology as a Reader for Scholars and Laymen), which was one of Germany's first journals of psychology. The journal featured much early work on mental pathology, deaf studies, social deviance, and the interpretation of dreams.

An interesting presentation, and LIHC also provides a pretty nice spread of food...